Here's the planet from the lesson. Working through the step-by-step was quite good, but I must have done something wrong. The size of the planet I made was too small for the rings that I downloaded, so I had to erase the inner ring. It made the planet look like someone had built Equator Highway all around it.

I took one other liberty: I didn't flood the background with a solid color — well, actually, I did but I thought it looked boring, so I filled the background layer with something I came up with in KPT3 Texture Explorer. (Yeah, yeah, I'm getting ahead of the lesson; but it does look nice!)

On this one, I played with the menu in the lower right corner (the one that looks like a diagram from biology class with the caption "How a Fertilized Cell Divides." I chose the option that makes 50 spheroids, then pulled down the menu choice beneath it and selected "Use Mutation." This is what resulted. Unedited, except for the Texture Explorer background — I seem to be stuck in a lightning-like pattern. Perhaps it will get better when I actually READ the instructions for the Texture Explorer. Actually, I would have preferred to use Flaming Pear's Glitterato filter here, but the instructions were pretty clear about not using non-KPT things in this lesson.

Why I like it: I've never used this particular option before and it looks kind of cool, although perhaps a bit crowded.

Yes, I did get carried away with this one. I used the Spheroid Designer with the Star Packing option and Make 10 Spheroids. It gave me eight, kind of in a row off to the right. I saw some possibilities, though, and duplicated the layer, flipped the duplicate horizontally, then merged the two layers. Now I had a band of planets across the middle of the screen. I duplicated again, and rotated the layer 90° clockwise. Then I ran an action which duplicated the layer, then shrank the duplicate 75% and rotated it 45°, and merged down. It duplicated the merged layer, shrank it again and rotated it 22.5°. I stopped the action before it could merge the layers, so I could play with the coloration of the new layer (too much of the same color pattern is boring). I then changed the coloration, subtracting Green and adding Blue until I got a yellowish orange hue that I liked.

Well, the focus was clear, but the background (plain white) was drab. I've gotten tired of the lightning stuff, so I used Gradient Designer to come up with a different background pattern. I'm thinking of checking with Bubble Puppy or maybe the Strawberry Alarm Clock to see if they want to make a comeback — I've got a CD cover for them. You'll have to trust me on this; I didn't think about "web-safe colors" — the original is much more vibrant!

Why I like it: it's got a nice symmetry, the colors in the original are grabby, it's got a nice beat and you can dance to it.