Okami Elements of Nature

I am confused....over AP's new uploading mechanism....haven't come around here for a long, long time...Anyway...erm what happened to the "spoiler" function? I liked to use that...eh I feel like a fish out of water now...

Okay I need papers. Not like I'm close to zero, but I'm not particularly spilling over with them either -.- Since I can't seem to find the equivalent of the "spoiler" function, I'm going to just put down everything here. It's quite long.

Inspiration: Shikata Akiko's 2009 album, Harmonia. It fuses the 4 basic elements of nature: wind, fire, water and earth. There are about 3-4 songs of each element, and the final 2 songs bring together all of them. To me, the 2nd last song, Chouwa ~Harmonia~, is possibly the best song of hers.

It took me many months to decide that I could showcase this "4 elements" thingie via Ookami, as Amaterasu has these 4 powers as well. It would take many more months after that before I came up with a suitable wall design, and some more months before I started walling it. It took about 4 months to complete, largely because of my schoolwork and also because of "inertia" (read: lazy).

Process: As per usual, I did Amaterasu first, followed by the flames around her (I refer to Ammy as "her"). Instead of trying to paint, I decided to leverage my vectoring advantage (and I am bad at painting. BAD) and opted for clean lines, complete with a slight Gaussian blur at the end. The scan of Ammy had so many random, "I don't know if it is a line" lines that I just relied on gut instinct to vector them in.

I extended some of the flames, and also added in additional shades to make them look more "alive". Finally, I did the so-called "big bg flame", and I left out the patterns on it because I did not know how to replicate that D: Anyway, as you can see, this is the "fire" section.

Then, I moved on to the "water" section. Ali Project's Katana to Saya brought to my attention the lovely artwork of Katanagatari, and I referenced the opening song's artwork to vector the water.

Next was the "earth" section. I wanted to use an old vector I did of a Guardian Sapling. But then I realized how bad I was back then. You can see it here. Be prepared for a shock though. Anyway I used 2 images of the Guardian Sapling: the first one is here, the second one, I can't seem to find it. It's from the Ookami Official Illustration guide. Then, using that second scan, I also vectored some flowers in. The weird coloured dotties on the ground was referenced from the first scan, and is my only non-vector work. I used a tablet to dot them in.

Since I was also fascinated with the torii gate, I added one in, referenced from photos off Google Images. However, the weird character on the signboard was referenced off Ookami's own torii gate.

Finally, I did the sky. I had to revector my old image of the Ookami sun, because I had done it in too small a size, and I had rasterized the vector -.- Then, I picked off some clouds from the Ookami Official Illustration guide and vectored them in. Finally, I used a "tried and tested" method of adding in sun rays (Gradient tool, noise), and experimented a bit with the background colours to try and get a radiant look.

As for "wind", Ookami is never complete without sakura petals dancing around, isn't it? So I plucked off the sakura petals off another image (which I can't seem to find too) and vectored them, to show "wind".

The worst part of this walling process was when I was all ready to put it as my desktop wall, and I realized that I had gotten my own screen resolution wrong -.- so I had to resize the canvas and reposition and resize a lot of things, in particular the flames around Ammy. Aside from that, it was standard vectoring, yes it got really tedious, especially around the Guardian Sapling, but it wasn't very difficult. Of course I kind of gave up on the "dotties" on the ground - I have no idea how to make them look less like measles.

Okay that's all. Is this description in line with AP's new policy? I don't know...I'm just all lost in the new layout...and I have been shut out of AP several times due to "overloading"...

EDIT: My bad. I am careless. One of the resolutions had a wrongly coloured layer mask, and I also forgot to remove the shadow on some parts of the water. Careless, careless me >.<