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Description
FULLVIEW, after all, it's the biggest thing I've ever done...that, and the reduced size hides the detail as is

I'll post detailed shots from the full resolution picture in my scraps in a day or two.
EDIT: The detail shots--
[link]

HOKAY, SO, as I said before, this is the biggest and most complex picture I've ever tried to do, and somehow, I was able to complete it after staring at the monitor for about 13 hours straight for two days (I'm a slow worker). Essentially after testing the Katana Gatari style ( [link] ) once, I decided to be an idiot and get ambitious, like I normally do and decided to do not only a full body, but four of them, and then decided to have them have a background and came up with this crazy thing.

The idea was that each character would represent a season. The order here (for some reason I did this) Fall, Winter, Summer, and Spring. Summer and Spring were originally in the opposite order, since the kid represented summer to me, but the girl's design, and the amount of green made it feel more summery (When I think of trees in summer, I think green with most of the flowers having gone away).

The thing to note here (and it's more apparent in the full resolution version) is that everything (with the exception of a brush a few times) was done, or based on something using the pen tool. Every shadow you see is a manually created gradient, meaning I chose out each color and then made them in succession to shift the color. It was an incredibly painstaking process, but it has a beauty to it that a gradient doesn't. I like it the most on the skin, because you can see it more, though with this small version you'll have to look closely.

Other Details:
It's been many pictures since I last did one of these O_o
For the sake of simplicity, I didn't go into any detail on designing the clothes for any of the characters. I think I'd've gone nuts if I did that. It took forever to not only make the characters, but decide how they'd interact with the tree. Then, clothes had to be done above the lineart layers, so it would've been hard to make edits if I kept the characters in their own file (it also would've made the document a whole lot faster to load...), so everything here was done in the same document. You can see an early build of it here: [link]

At first, I didn't know how I'd be able to divide the tree into sections for each season, but eventually I decided on katanas in scabbards to be the margins for each part (except for the leg of Summer). The Winter section of the tree is my favorite, but that might be because I love blues and whites.

The backgrounds were a crazy project in themselves because I had to somehow work out transitions. I kept flipping through Katana Gatari dozens of times looking for design ideas, and eventually I found that I would have to rely on my own creativity for a lot of it based on what I had learned so far. The mountain on the right half was inspired by the style test, and I knew at the bottom that I could use a checker pattern for design, but after that I had to start getting creative. I decided to use the receding checker pattern to transition into a pond, and then up from there I borrowed the idea of sand dunes from the book. I didn't know if they'd be as obvious as I hoped, so I added sand coming off the top of them. Then I went from the top of the picture down, creating the sky, clouds, and an abstract representation of the sun, but was left with a sliver in between that and the starry sky. I decided I needed some more warm colors, so I made a few hills in Autumn, though I probably should have added more trees.

Unfortunately, I don't have the Fauvist mentality that the artist's whose style I borrowed does, and can't put too harsh or distant a color against one another, so I could only mimic so much. It's probably for the best, because even though I had a style model, I still made everything myself and used my own taste and technique at the same time.

After this though, I think I might retire the style for now. I'm exhausted, and I think I learned from it the most I can for now @_@

No further edits will be made to this piece.

Art©
Style inspiration©Whoever illustrates the Katana Gatari light novels.

I can haz pageviews nao?

Description
FULLVIEW, after all, it's the biggest thing I've ever done...that, and the reduced size hides the detail as is

I'll post detailed shots from the full resolution picture in my scraps in a day or two.
EDIT: The detail shots--
[link]

HOKAY, SO, as I said before, this is the biggest and most complex picture I've ever tried to do, and somehow, I was able to complete it after staring at the monitor for about 13 hours straight for two days (I'm a slow worker). Essentially after testing the Katana Gatari style ( [link] ) once, I decided to be an idiot and get ambitious, like I normally do and decided to do not only a full body, but four of them, and then decided to have them have a background and came up with this crazy thing.

The idea was that each character would represent a season. The order here (for some reason I did this) Fall, Winter, Summer, and Spring. Summer and Spring were originally in the opposite order, since the kid represented summer to me, but the girl's design, and the amount of green made it feel more summery (When I think of trees in summer, I think green with most of the flowers having gone away).

The thing to note here (and it's more apparent in the full resolution version) is that everything (with the exception of a brush a few times) was done, or based on something using the pen tool. Every shadow you see is a manually created gradient, meaning I chose out each color and then made them in succession to shift the color. It was an incredibly painstaking process, but it has a beauty to it that a gradient doesn't. I like it the most on the skin, because you can see it more, though with this small version you'll have to look closely.

Other Details:
It's been many pictures since I last did one of these O_o
For the sake of simplicity, I didn't go into any detail on designing the clothes for any of the characters. I think I'd've gone nuts if I did that. It took forever to not only make the characters, but decide how they'd interact with the tree. Then, clothes had to be done above the lineart layers, so it would've been hard to make edits if I kept the characters in their own file (it also would've made the document a whole lot faster to load...), so everything here was done in the same document. You can see an early build of it here: [link]

At first, I didn't know how I'd be able to divide the tree into sections for each season, but eventually I decided on katanas in scabbards to be the margins for each part (except for the leg of Summer). The Winter section of the tree is my favorite, but that might be because I love blues and whites.

The backgrounds were a crazy project in themselves because I had to somehow work out transitions. I kept flipping through Katana Gatari dozens of times looking for design ideas, and eventually I found that I would have to rely on my own creativity for a lot of it based on what I had learned so far. The mountain on the right half was inspired by the style test, and I knew at the bottom that I could use a checker pattern for design, but after that I had to start getting creative. I decided to use the receding checker pattern to transition into a pond, and then up from there I borrowed the idea of sand dunes from the book. I didn't know if they'd be as obvious as I hoped, so I added sand coming off the top of them. Then I went from the top of the picture down, creating the sky, clouds, and an abstract representation of the sun, but was left with a sliver in between that and the starry sky. I decided I needed some more warm colors, so I made a few hills in Autumn, though I probably should have added more trees.

Unfortunately, I don't have the Fauvist mentality that the artist's whose style I borrowed does, and can't put too harsh or distant a color against one another, so I could only mimic so much. It's probably for the best, because even though I had a style model, I still made everything myself and used my own taste and technique at the same time.

After this though, I think I might retire the style for now. I'm exhausted, and I think I learned from it the most I can for now @_@

No further edits will be made to this piece.

Art©
Style inspiration©Whoever illustrates the Katana Gatari light novels.

I can haz pageviews nao?