With the exception of the one under his feet, the houses were drawn using the line tool, turned up to a very high width. The domes are done with PDN's round ended line mode. You can draw them in a separate layer than the sky itself, so you can add stars or whatever later.
The shading was done with a
very transparent black brush on seperate layer. You can't see the individual strokes, because it takes several passes over the same spot to get a visable impression.
This feels like wasted effort, since the compression makes the whole thing look splotchy anyway.
I tried blurring the shading layer to make it softer, but that probably did more harm than good, by weakening the shading around the edges.
I would resent the implication that lasers need a sense of motion, but some of these things are clearly projectiles that should have a referencable velocity, and not just beams.
Because of the way younger me merged the layers in the wrong order, and then saved it, blurring the projectiles would have messed up the lasers. I like the beams more so I kept them intact, at the detriment of the tracers.
