Have you ever seen the top of a rusty fire hydrant and thought it looked like a distant planet floating in the Cosmos? Me neither. Thankfully, Redditor gumballbrain did, and recently shared a series of ‘fire hydrant planets‘ on Reddit that promptly made yesterday’s front page.

As for how he came up with the idea, it was, like so many things, by chance:

“I took a picture of a fire hydrant without intention to manipulate it, and then I masked it into a circle in Photoshop out of curiosity. Added some colors, here and there…
 
You throw the image into Photoshop, then use Select > Color Range to grab a selection of either the “water” or “land” areas on the photo. Manipulate the selections by changing colors, or adding texture. Whenever I’m walking around town I keep an eye out for these types of fire hydrants, or any type of textured spherical objects for that matter. [Source 1, 2]

 

You can find more artwork including pixel art on his tumblr site at trapexoid.tumblr.com

You can find the original thread on Reddit here.