Planet Tutorial - Alejor IV - Arid Planet

I previously posted this tutorial on my dystopian wars blog. Now that I have gotten sucked into Planetfall I imagine we will be playing FSA quite a bit more frequently. I have plans to do a couple of additional planets as well as some asteroids, etc... This planet is Alejor IV, the fourth planet of the Alejor system, for our campaign. It can also work very nicely as a generic arid/desert world.

I started the project with a 12" diameter hollow Styrofoam half sphere. I briefly sanded it with a fine finish sandpaper and then coated it with mod podge to try and create as smooth of a surface as possible.
Next I painted the entire sphere a dark marine blue. Once that dried I painted a thin coat of turquoise over the dark blue. The idea being for there to be lots of depth and variations of color in the blues.

Ocean painted

Next I needed to draw in some land masses and then fill them in with an earthen color. 

Filling in the landmasses.

After the landmasses dried I dry brushed a sand color on the lower half of the planet as this is supposed to be an arid/desert world. Above the sand I started to add a little more red and brown to the mixture to create a transitional area. I also added some islands and texture to the coast lines to make everything look a little more realistic.

We have deserts and islands!

Next I filled in the upper portion of the land masses with a dark green followed by a light green to give the appearance of plains and forests. This was painted on lightly as I still wanted to retain a lot of variation between the greens and browns. A mixture of a medium brown and red was also used to further deepen the transition between the desert and the northern plains.

Northern plains painted

Next it was time to start detailing the mountains. Using a detail brush I dabbed/blotted along the desert/plains transition to create the illusion of a mountain range. Many of the islands also got a little blot of white as well where I thought a mountain would make sense. The idea was to try and follow a logical path with the mountains. For me I thought maybe a northern mountain range would impede the encroaching deserts allowing for the small valleys you can see below. After that I tried to add snow along the northern coast of each continent.

Mountain ranges and snow.

I detailed a few more mountains and snow and then decided it was time for my Polar Ice Cap. This was just a white paint. Initially I created an outline and then went back and filled it in with white.

Ice Age ho!

After the snow and ice was finished it was time to go through and add some shallow water to further define the oceans. For this I took the turquoise I used for the ocean and mixed a little white and a little light blue. I then very lightly painted this along many of the coasts and around several of the island chains where I thought maybe the water would be a little shallower. Generally closer to the equator had more shallow water than the areas further north.

Shallow waters, check!

Wanting to further define my deserts I took a sand color and mixed a little brown in. I didn't want to completely cover everything painted previously so I wiped of the majority of the paint each time before I blotted the paint on the deserts. The land looked a little more organic this way and still had a lot of depth to it.

Only the clouds left now!

With the terrestrial part of the planet finished I moved on to the final and scariest step.... clouds. Before I even attempted this I researched several pictures of the earth from space on Google to get an idea of how clouds would look from above. I really wanted to capture the depth that people would get from viewing a planet from space. I thinned some white paint and wiped off the brush before each time, leaving only a little paint on the brush I began to blot areas over the water near the pole. It seemed like from the pictures I had looked at that large cloud formations tended to be closer to the poles. I repeated this process until I was satisfied with how the clouds were looking. I tried to be irregular about it as well to make it look more realistic. Overall I am pretty happy with how it turned out and I am definitely looking forward to doing another one!

Alejor IV