First, let me explain: Everything you see in each piece is a fractal, made by me. The sun, the planet, the Deathstar, and the starry background are each a different fractal.

 
Fractals are basically pure mathematics plotted onto a 2D plane or 3D space. If you're interested in how the maths works, please let me know in the comments =)

And then there's the creative writing. If you zoom into the image, on the bottom white line that is framing the planet/Deathstar, you will find words. (The same words that are under each image above).

They give some context to the images, which are snapshots of a universe that exists in my mind, where the Deathstar from Star Wars meets an Archivist race from the Star Trek universe ;) ...

Also, notice the max. print size... 53" x 35"... That is over 1 meter on the long side! ... Which means it took a long time to render each fractal.

Now for some deconstructions...:

The starry background:

I knew how I would achieve this because I have done a lot of spacey art before. I opened up trusty old "JWildFire"...

And tweaked some old parameters of mine until it looked just right:

The sun:

I had some idea of how I would do the sun... In Mandelbulb 3D (the fractal software I use) you can render up a sphere pretty easily:

From here, you can add a texture to the sphere, to distort its surface, used as a heightmap. I downloaded many black and white textures until I found the right one...:

I had to tweak the parameters a lot before getting it to look how I had in mind (even then, it wasn't quite right...):

Of course, it was still way too "perfect" to look like a roaring sun. Where are the sunflares?? ... So I needed to combine the sphere with some craziness:

And that did it! ^^

The mushroom planet:

With fractals, it is quite easy to find mushroom shapes... Just go type "fractal mushroom" into deviantArt or Google images search and you'll see what I mean... But, I just couldn't get a mushroom PLANET, no matter how hard I tried. So in desperation, I searched for "mushroom" in a fractal group I'm part of on Facebook, and found someone had done this! :

I could work with that! I contacted the fractalnaut and he kindly gave me permission to tweak his formulae. It took a lot of tweaking but I finally got it, as you can see in the art ;) I just needed to make it a bit more psychedelic, so I added this as a colour map:

The Deathstar:

I'm especially proud of this! =) ... I loaded up a sphere as I explained above with the sun. I then used a wonderful little tool called JSPlacement to generate a heightmap:

That by itself though wasn't going to do it. I needed to do some editing in Photoshop to make it into a Deathstar heightmap:

After A LOT of tweaking to get it just right, I added it to the sphere and presto! My very own Deathstar creation ;)

And finally, here are a few close up details so that you can fully appreciate the size of them! =)

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So there you have it! =) ... Science and maths, meets visual art, meets creative writing.
My brothers were both very, very happy with them ^^