Art process

From right to left, snapshots on this one. Inspired, of course, by Star Trek IV. I really love the film; I wanted to give something that ... sort of conveyed how I feel about it.

My initial layer is always very loose, and I used a lot of stabilizer, drafting constraints, vector shapes etc. (for this, in clip studio/affinity designer, although my current project is Krita). My fun fact for this one? The light gleam: it's a riff on optical animation. You take two 'cookies' with transparent rayed elements, slide them past each other, and expose that to get a starburst. In this case, I took the difference between my two rayed layers as a layer of white lines that I motion-blurred, colored, and layered additively for an RGB rainbow result.

The final result, more or less: