Hi,

after i finished my second wall, i decided to restart something that i planned to do for a while but never got to.

I two screenshots of a pan and put them together, making the bottom part of the wallpaper. Oh yea, this is also the first wall I've used illustrator to vector the characters, so please tell me if they look funny! there are some problems i don't know how to approach so i was hoping you guys could give me some feedback.

First is that big ramune bottle that covers megumi's head. Second is the top part of the wallpaper. How should i try to blend in their faces to the background?

Or should I scrap the entire thing because the ramune bottle is too distracting?

Any help would be much appreciated.

http://img511.imageshack.us/img511/9276/experimental6yd.jpg

P.S This is a VERY VERY rough layout of what i had in mind. The final product (if it does get finalized) will look alot better.

I know this is the rough layout, but I think adding all four pics is too much. The two on the bottom is sufficent to produce the desired mood ^^ Good luck on this wall ^^

Thanks for the response!

because of the way the screens were, the picture on the bottom wouldn't be long enough for a full wallpaper. so, there would be a lot of blank space above. heres a thought that just popped into my head: how about i seperate the pictures and put ayato in the upper left corner, and megumi in the lower right uppside down and flipped. The wall in center would be the point of reflection.

Anyways, any suggestions?

Well the bottom pictures look like they have been vectored. If you are able to do vectors then you could enlarge and vector them afterwards to get the height you need.

The big problem with the wall is that megu is covered by bottle. Unless you have an alternate shot I don't see how you can really draw her in, tbh.

The point of the composition of that shot in the original scene (from memory) is that she is covered by the bottle - he doesn't really see her clearly, to put it crudely. Now whilst that may make sense to people who've seen the show, I'm not sure it makes sense to other people. Plus, it only really works in context - even peopel who've seen it may just think "Why is meg covered by a bottle?"

As such, I think unless you can find a shot so that you can re-draw her, you may need to rethink even including her in the wall. You could chop her out and leave the bottle. This would leave an interesting composition and give an extreme sense of loneliness. Those who had seen the show would also have the knowledge of what relevance the bottles have adding an extra something, but it's not necessary.

To "fill the space" you could crop things slightly and then extend the details of the roof. You could use text to amplify the loneliness, or leave it textless for more mood.

Hope that helps you in some way - it's a bit rambley :/.

You guys have some very good points. It is true that the ramune bottle is a big obstruction, but removing megumi from the wallpaper would get rid of the contrast between the two that I had in mind. i was skimming through the DVD and i saw this shot, and thought it could work too? potential problems may be that their is too much dead space and the characters are too small. If i attempted to vector this, how could I do the background so it wouldn't lose detail?


http://img451.imageshack.us/img451/7923/newex4qb.jpg


again, thanks for your help guys!

The cahracters will only be a small percentage of that wall if you leave it as is. I hope you wont actually make the entire background, filling up 90% of the wall... I don't understand how the bg would lose detail if you vectored it. It's just plain color walls/ceiling and doors.

newtyp3

http://img451.imageshack.us/img451/7923/newex4qb.jpg

That's a much better starting point for a wall, I would say. You've got the contrast of them being back to back, the contrast of the style of the rooms, the warm open colours on the 'female' side and the dark, blue, introverted colours on the male side, reflecting both inner conflicts and character traits. The charas are small in the wall, emphasising their loneliness, although I would actually crop the image slighty after vectoring it in order to get them a little bigger - this could potentially be sat on a 1024*768 desktop, so you don't want them too small or people won't really use it. One of the big advantages of vectors is you can resize them with no loss of quality. Plus you could use text to help make it seem that it's more deliberate use of space.

In terms of doing the actual vector you have two choices, I guess. First would be to go for a clean style. Thsi could work, but may look a little flat. The other would be to do the vector, but use it as a starting point. You could then apply brushing and textures to the various parts of the wall (Ie the woods and shoji screens) as well as adding some lighting gradients in order to "recreate" (you'd be more sort of using the original image as inspiration) the screen cap. I'd go with the latter, as that suits me more.

I decided to crop most of the backgroudn out, making the characters bigger and taking up more space on the wallpaper. I think there is still a good amount of space above them for any text and whatnot. I agree with you, trismugistus. I'll vector the characters and use brushes and textures for the background. haha, ill have to look up how to use brushes and textures, though. Im pretty much a newb when it comes to photoshop and illustrator.

here is the screenshot i am currently working with:

http://img381.imageshack.us/img381/8753/newnewnewcopy1jd.jpg

are the characters big enough or is there not enough background?

Well, no matter how much you crop them they are way too blury :(
I think that htis time you made them too big, maybe you should concentraite less on them (after you vector them) and more on other things :D, GL

When you say other things, are you talking about the background? I guess I'll make the characters smaller. Blurriness should not be a problem at all once i vector them.

Do you have an enormous monitor, btw? It's often easier to judge trial walls at smaller resolution, like 1024*768 (1600 involves scrolling for most people). Plus being a screen cap it wouldn't be so blurrey resized to just 1024.

Anywho, the cropping seems reasonable, but personally I would vector the whole thing and then think about cropping it, though. You wouldn't want to vector just that bit and then think "the charas are a bit big" - it'd be a pain the arse to add in a couple of hundred pixels, but really easy to remove them.