>>713293575Wow, thanks! That means a lot, anon.
>>713294151Background is two parts. You have all the actual background stuff like clouds and the sun against the inky black backdrop of space, then you have the terrestrial atmospheric scattering, made up of various gradients.
The secret sauce to this, and all my other drawings, is that the image data isn't actually tied directly to what gets shown on the monitor. So, unlike a normal image editor, where 0 is black on a monitor, and 1 is white, I draw in a color space where the values you use are based on the actual, physical brightness of the objects. So instead of the sun being rgb(1.00, 1.00, 1.00), it's actually like rgb(4096.00, 1348.00, 41.00).
It's essentially Multiply shading on steroids. And it's very similar to how 3D renderers do their shading.