Skull earth

I made this art piece from scratch. I Started work in Photoshop with my trusty but, almost dead wacom intuos3 tablet.

I firstly made a sketch of the skull (it's on my profile page, go have a look) and refined that sketch into a digital painted piece.
loads and load of layers were used  The skull represents the human life form that is long dead.

Secondly I started to plan this background image of our cosmos. I painted the background in photoshop on a black layer,
then started to add color with a soft brush on different layers. Then I started to play with the layer properties to get a different effect for each layer I added.
I finally started to add the stars by adding another dotted layer to the rest. This landed me with an almost real milkyway looking galaxy going. It's not accurate though.  

I then started with the planet: I used textures I took with my tablet's 8mp camera, I desaturated the textures and pulled them into a circle I drew with the marque tool.
I spherised the circle and then added another 3 layers to it, one for inner glow, another for outer glow, and then a shadow. 
Again i played around with the layer properties to get different effect from it. this was a grueling process, as I had to redo this 3 times until I was happy with the outcome.

I finally added the painted skull to the mixture and started to erase parts of the skull with a soft brush and again played around with the layer properties to get the desired effect.
Lastly I used a rusted metal texture I got when i bought an "imaginefx magazine" and overlayed it over the skull. Lastly I then played with the saturation and used the burn tool on it.

It took me over 32 hours to complete