Is it bright where you are?

Sadly limited by my mortal frame, this is a mishandling of imagery suggested (though it was vague from the beginning) from the Smashing Pumpkins song The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning which is a b-side from the contrariwise named The End Is The Beginning Is The End which popped into existence probably... 10 or more years ago on the soundtrack of the last of the shitty 90s batman movies.
The b-side is much better, and recently appeared in the teaser for The Watchmen movie.

It's been a while since I actually made something honestly new and posted it, and this I made, with a few other projects (curse me, I can never work on just one at a time) over a few hours every other night or so for the last week.. roughly.

I was trying to go with something similar to the style that seems to have struck a cord with people, as seen in D One, and Eyes Of The Storm, but I just couldn't give up all that color.

The image itself was assembled in GIMP, and has about five pieces of hubble telescope imagery (always love that), from [link] Three for the BG, and the last two for the "stars" in the foreground. They have some of my odd little frames, so ought to be easy to spot if anyone is counting.

( in case anyone wonders about rights.
[link] I believe I am in the clear. )

and this [link] from shanghai-stock

I didn't really know where I was going with this when I started it, and my inclusion of shanghai-stock's stuff was mostly to see if I could make something as dark as I was trying for and still include a cute girl with big glasses. It wasn't as easy as I suspected, but I think I pulled it off okay, despite it being somewhat obscured by the brushwork. In fact, I originally meant to make it seem as if she was standing in this outerspace environment. Needless to say, that didn't work very well. I was going to put some little ships in there or something, but in a bitter fight to sacrifice or mute all the color I could, I fell in love with the way it was going. The black brushwork a little more heavy than I wanted but I like how it turned out. Also, one of my stars collapsed in on itself, evidently, and became a black-hole thing (I love the little surprises that making stuff manifests).

I am really rambling too much here, but all told I am pretty proud of this. A bit more than I expected I would be. I hope someone likes it too.

I saved my far more colorful stops along the way. I might make them scraps or something, or keep them to tool with later.