Next, we'll create our background, we don't

just want it to be black, that's boring.

If you Google images of space, you'll see a lot of

images with some pretty cool colors and that's what we wanna mimic.

So, let's create a new layer for our

background beneath the ground layer, named BG colors.

Now, create a black rectangle with the Rectangle tool, as big as the artboard.

Click anywhere on the artboard to get the Rectangle panel.

We want it to be a 568 by 320, cuz that's how big our artboard is.

Now, change it to black.

And align it to the artboard, with the Alignment tools.

Next, duplicate that rectangle, and make its fill a gradient.

You can make an object's fill a gradient by using the greater

than symbol on your keyboard, or just by selecting it from the toolbar.

Choose a deep purple, or maroon color for one of the swatches.

And the other swatch, a deep black.

Next, make it a radial gradient and lower the opacity to 70%.

We want the lighter color in the middle so we're going to reverse the gradient.

[BLANK_AUDIO].

You can edit the size of your gradient by hitting G on your keyboard.

Or selecting the Gradient tool from the toolbar.

[BLANK_AUDIO].

That's looking pretty great.

Lets add some small stars with the Pencil

tool trick you learned from the ground layer.

Create a new layer called atmosphere.

Just scribble a bit now, like we did on the ground.

Select your

Pencil tool.

Set the stroke color to a gradient, let's make it a blue going to white.

[BLANK_AUDIO].

Make sure you change the gradient type to linear.

Set the stroke width to 0.25 pixels and make sure it's dashed.

Your settings from before should already be in the dash blind fields.

Next, let's set a variable with brush stroke.

This will just give a little variance in size for our stars.

Now, let's duplicate this layer and flip it over to create some more stars.

But let's change this stroke to one pixel.

This gives a little depth to our scene.

We've got bigger stars up front and smaller start in the back.

That's looking pretty good, but let's add one more atmospheric effect.

We're going to create a layer than I'm going to call

stardust and do the same basic trick with the Pencil tool.

[BLANK_AUDIO].

Let's just make the stroke blue, instead of a gradient color.

[BLANK_AUDIO].

And let's set the stroke to 30 pixels.

Make sure you turn the dashed line off.

Next, we're going to go up to Effect > Blur > Gaussian Blur.

And set the radius to 30 pixels.

You can see it gives our stroke a feathered effect.

Now, I'm going to lower the opacity to 30%.

And change its blend mode in the Transparency panel to hard light.

You can always adjust this path if you don't like your result.

Now, the last touch will be some

bigger stars that we'll add manually with ellipses.

Make a couple of different colored ellipses.

[BLANK_AUDIO].

Feel free to adjust the opacity of your star dust layer.

You can mess with different blend modes to give different effects.

Something like overlay might give you a more subtle texture.

The last missing piece of the puzzle to our background, is our planets.

After you're done sketching your planets and finding some

colors, you might end up with something like this.

Feel free to rearrange the planets however you want.

For example, I'll move the bigger planet

to the bottom right and rotate it slightly.

That looks pretty good.

And that's it for our background.

Now, we can move on to our character graphics.