Sphere Update 1

After a few tweaks to the sphere, I've started in on the shadows. So far they look bad but with some more blending, erasing and shaping they should be good. It's difficult to get things the way you want because I tend to either change things too much or not enough.

Color Blending

 Yellow, Red, Blue blend

Blue, Black, Red blend

Using the brush on very low flow (1-5%) and a little bit of a lowered opacity (60-80%) I was able to blend the colors efficiently. I overlapped the colors and selected the resulting color in the middle to blend and continued with that process.
PS. It looks a lot better than this. The files must have lost some quality when converted to jpeg.

Brushes

Some more experimenting with brushes! I made the stars by modifying the brush to have a high scatter so that I could paint several at once rather than painting each individual one. I also decided to create a planet because I wanted to practice making spheres. I like the look of it and made it smudged to give it a natural look. It reminds me of Mars. I also put in some ambient white light in the background by using a large brush with low opacity to lighten it up a bit.

Sphere

I've just started making this 3D sphere. So far I have the basic shape and general idea of shadow (it helped to use a mask so that I was only able to color within the circle) but there is plenty more work to be done. I still need the ground shadow, ambient shadow, specular highlight, etc, and better blending in general.

Brushes

Here is another experiment with brushes. I upped the size of different brushes to the point where they were square-ish with 90 degree angles. By lowering the opacity I was able to get different shades by simply layering them on top of each other. This created a cool camouflage effect so I went with it. I also made it smudged at the end by using another brush at a large size.

Brushes

Here I was experimenting with the different brushes and settings. First I set down a general idea of what I wanted, then painted on some grass with the grass paintbrush. After that was the fun part: the clouds. I knew that I had to make them wispy and see through like natural clouds so I turned down the hardness and erased a lot.