Lion Spider = Lider? Splion? Arachleo!

Back in April when it was still summer here in Chile and life was coming back to normal after February's massive quake, I remember seeing a mosquito-like insect on a wall. I associated it
with horses due to its rather strange shape and although it wasn't much like a mosquito I began wondering what a horsequito would look like. So I had this:


Horsequito by ~skinsvideos21 on deviantART

Yeah... so in the description I jokingly mentioned its natural predator, the Lion Spider. And here I am now, several months later with my Splion (for the lack of a better name). It was even tougher to conceive since spiders and lions share almost nothing in common anatomically. Spiders have 2 body sections while lions, uh... I'd say 3 although the difference between abdomen and 'butt' doesn't mean anything in vertebrates, does it? :3

So, here are a few sketches (I got rid of the roughest unfortunately) with roughies of the idea:



As the sketches above show, I wasn't entirely sure where the hell the legs would go (again, spiders have abdomens that don't have legs and then they have thoraxes with legs), because the way a spider's legs kinda 'spread' outwards while a lion's legs jut below the body and are parallel. So it's just experimenting while the final design was a mixture.
And well, the final (although far from perfect work) is this:

It looks a whole lot better than Horsequito (a million times!) but I'm not perfectly happy with it. That irritates me. Argh!

Click for larger image:

Goddamit I Love Space Art!

''Space art?'', you say.
''Yes, of course! Art about planets n' stars n' black holes and loads of crazy stuff we don't actually know much about!'' I answer, my eyes as bright as fictitious constellations.
''Pfft, you don't need talent to draw stars, just paint white dots on a canvas and you'll get there!''
I suddenly darken up, and in a distant and redshifting manner I utter:
''It takes a lot more than that, even for simple stuff like star fields, mofo.''

Although I gotta say that realistic planets are even harder to create, but it's not that hard.
This really nice tutorial by the awesome Greg Martin (what a kickass website he has!) leads us into the basics of making realistic and beautiful star fields in Photoshop. Although it's true to some extent that it's all about ''painting stars at random'', this guy shows an excellent way of creating stars without painting them individually, and without the use of crappy starfield generators. Intuition at the helm!

So, did it work? I haven't had time to fully flesh out something, but my first attempt was okay. This is it:
...Yeah, it's alright. Not posting this in DeviantArt.

However, I want to understand eventually how these beauties are made:


Sea of Divinity 2 by *dylanxedge on deviantART


Lost in Bitterness... by =synax444 on deviantART


Brutus by *TixoL on deviantART

Ahem. Does this count as space art? NO!
However, it makes a nice wallpaper (I think).


Space Jungle Tile by ~skinsvideos21 on deviantART