Extraterrestrial Skies // Art Catharsis

Yesterday I proposed an art contest to challenge everyone to make something to channel the emotions that are sizzling in the air this week. I will be participating as well and here is my first one... Alien Skies:

To start I began drawing in photoshop, then copy and pasting the layer over and over moving it a bit each time. The first draft looked something like this:

I played around with liquifying these layers and then started color filling the white areas, next evolution looked like this:

I then further distorted the image creating a 3D fractal and height mapping to arrive at this and then added some animation to give it a breathing effect:

Come join the contest here: Art Catharsis