Well, i'm working on my third wall and i just want to know if i need to improve anything

here's my wall


also it would help me a lot if i know wat anime this girl came from

Sorry i don't know what series this girl is from, but i can say you have a lot of work to do before this is ready to hit submission.

you've attempted to blend together many different stock photos for the bg. nice try...but it's not really working. the pieces don't fit very well with each other. despite your efforts, it is generally easy to tell where you've tried to blend the stocks together. blending stock to make it look flawless is difficult...especially so when some of the stuff you have is low quality. take the sakura tree: artifacting and blurriness. and i can't really make out what some of the stuff is, like that part behind the sakura tree to the left of the mountains, with the red and green stuff on it. you want your wall to be clear and a confusing scenic piece isn't such a great idea.

as well, stocks are photos and they are realistic. that's a pretty big contrast with the style of anime. the realism in stock kind of prevents the scan from fitting in properly. the overall tone is also grayish, making the bg look low quality. it also isolates the girl, whose tones are much better saturated than the bg. it makes it even harder for her to look like she belongs there.

now, the girl doesn't need that glow around her. it looks funny when you see where her lower body goes dark (why so suddenly? and is the shading explained by some object blocking the sunlight? if not, then the lighting does not make sense and has to be adjusted), she glows against the rock. and you'll have to work on your extraction. you've left her with jagged edges and that's not going to cut it... what tool are you using?

i'd also remove default effects used on the text as well. but for now, work with the text is dwarfed by your issues with the scan and the bg. your stitching work shows that you are trying and that you have a concept in mind, but your execution is, sorry to say, poor. all in all, this is a huge undertaking if this is only your third wall. personally, i would have set this idea side in favor of something more suited to a beginner's level of skill if i were on my third wall. i don't mean to belittle what you are capable of, but concepts are only worthwhile pursuing if you know realistically that you've got what it takes to make concepts into actual pieces of art.

sorry if this sound harsh. ^^;

Ok, first off it looks like you used a stock photo for the background. All I can say is this: no. Unless you can give the photo an animated feel it does not work for a background. I can name on one hand the number of anime walls that I've seen that have worked using a stock photo. So I would immediately scratch the background and start over, look at some tutorials and try to make your own scene, it'll look much nicer, flow better, and show you put a lot of effort into the wall if you do so.

Second, the scan itself needs some work. It's of a good enough quality that you wouldn't need to vector it, especially since you should be concerned mainly with the background at the moment, but the extraction needs some work. Take the original image and paste it over an entirely black layer. Then, using the polygonal lasso tool, cut around the image. Right now the edges of the scan look rough and don't flow very well. Also, it's extremely rare that you'll have a situation where you would need to use an outside glow effect on a scan. It only makes the image feel out-of-place and not in tune with the rest of the wall.

Ok, im back,and i pretty much redo the whole wall, except i kept the rock,and don't worry Asa01, im used to harsh comments, so yea i followed Sakura's advice and started over, hopefully this time the wall isn't as bad as last 1 ^^;

Well, even though the thumbnail looks great, much work is still necessary upon closer inspection.

- the hills look stock-like and grayish and thus lacking interest. looking rather barren too. when going for that paradisical setting, you want absolutely everything to look lush and heavenly.

- it is nice to have aquamarine water but the rippled warping effect you tried on the right half of it looks...rather bad, because it just doesn't work like that. the water can warp reflections and light, yes, but it only breaks it up due to all the multiple facets reflecting incoming light, not warp it into continuous curves.

- the palm tree? not working well. looks absolutely flat, even with the emboss and the 3-d texture, both of which work against making the tree look nice. that non-flat look is not achieved by some default effect: it requires thought to the actual physical shape of each part of the tree and subsequently fitting shading according to your light source. after all, you wouldn't shade a cylinder (the trunk) the same way as you would a piece of paper (palm leaf).

- the water trickling off the stone the girl's sitting on no longer makes any sense. unless she's sitting on a natural spring of something, why would where be water coming off it? everything must make sense!

- the extraction on her is still jagged. manual way by hand is best, in case you are using some sort of shortcut. i'm also kinda uncertain about the effects and stuff you have going on on top of the girl. (what are they supposed to be, exactly?) and with her facing the right side of the wall, the lighting on her is kinda off compared to where i'm supposing the sun is.

- you would not normally see grass in sparse rows. and then there are also those dottier brushings. excuse the vague languaged because i'm not sure what they are exactly. they just don't look quite right or natural.

- don't over-embellish your text. it just takes away from it. as well, i spot two brushes that appear to bo those intended for corners/borders. looks rather strange, to be honest.

there, that should be pretty straightforward. and i generally apologize for being harsh if i feel that i've said a lot of negative things. some people don't take it that well and i don't want to discourage aspiring wallers. it's nice to hear that you are okay with it though. anyway, your wall in general is better than before, but much work is still required. keep up the effort.

Whew! that took me a while,

asa01

- the extraction on her is still jagged. manual way by hand is best, in case you are using some sort of shortcut.

i didn't use any shortcut, i only used the polygon tool and she is still jagged?
hopefully she won't be jagged this time...

Hi there...
well the extraction is still not good enough... it looks jagged.. i suggest you to use the polygonal lazo with a 400-500 zoom.
Also the reflection on the water should be less noticable.. so try turning down the opacity of that...
Also you need to fix the grass... for example the big grass at the bottom looks blurry.. and it's too tall.. make it smaller..
About the plam tree.. on the right side.. mmm get rid of that texture.. cause it doesn't look good.. i think you should redo the plam tree (sorry about that)
Goodluck!
kisses..

Sorry to say, extraction is still jagged. and you've also cut away parts of her outline. zooming in to something like 500% helps, and also make sure you are extremely patient when you use the polygonal lasso...as in click a lot and undoing any click that isn't perfect. it is strange that you are getting jagged stuff with the lasso -- that has never ever happened to me in the old days when i used the lasso. =/ but nowadays, i'd use the pen tool to extract if i extract at all (because most of the time, i always vector, and by vectoring, the layers are already separate from the bg.)

the palm tree still does not work for the same reasons i mentioned in my previous post. i'm not going to copy and paste because that'd be redundant and it only takes a little scrolling to see what i said.

the grass is much much better, so excellent job with that! =] i don't mind the blurry grass -- people will probably know that it's because of focus (although it is strange that close things are out of focus but things too far away are not... but leave that alone for now)

the perfectly still water does not fully make sense. mirror still lakes are mostly dead lakes, lakes fed only by rainfall and have no drainage except for evaporation (or as far as i know anyway) but you have waterfalls. so there should be slight ripples at the least. and the reflection should be slightly faded compared to the real thing. as well, the reflection should have the same colors as what is being reflected...and that color consistency is missing. and wow, quite some colorful mountains.

and the waterfalls... they should not look completely blue like that because bodies of water only look blue because they reflect the sky. they can be blue tinted but having a kind of solid pillar looks weird. and the mist raised up by the plunging water should be more misty (in other words, blurry and kind of translucent) and not so solid looking. as well, the two larger waterfalls kinda bug me.

the one on the left: that is a huge volume of water coming from nowhere. huge waterfalls come from rivers pouring over an escarpment, not out of mountains. and there wouldn't be trees in the middle of that much water.

the one on the right: again, a huge unexplained volume of water. the top part kinda looks like a river running down a mountain...kind of makes be wonder how it ran up the other side of the mountain. ^^; normally, out of mountain ranges, the rivers are quite small and the waterfalls are quite thin.

ah, another long post. anyway, hope this helps and that my explanations are understandable. don't get discouraged! keep going. you are improving with your updates. :D

Hi again!
Lol, here's an updated version,

i thought flipping her over would make her look a little better and, well... i did wat you guys said, hopefully its a little better then last time ^^;
Crits & comments are always welcome!

Hehe, being picky and making you do a lot of work here. but hey, that's what critics are supposed to be like: picky.

-tree: much better trunk! congrats on getting that part nailed. now that leaves the palm leaves. again, you can't use emboss (or whatever other default blending effect) here. it just doesn't look natural and right. look at some proper palm leaves to see what they should look like. as well, there is some noticeable fading done to one leaf and the edges of the leaves don't look sharp -- they are kind of rounded and some have floating bits. and the palm leaves are yellow now? may i ask what season this is?

-i still feel that it's weird that there is watering running down the rock the girl is sitting on. and speaking of the girl, her edges/outlines are still jagged in places. i don't know why that is happening, even with polygonal lasso... but here's a shortcut you can try before re-extraction: duplicate the scan layer and move the duplicate underneath; gaussian filter at a good radius that is sufficient for softening her edges but not enough to create any sort of haze around her.

-the water is far better than before as well. however, the ripples don't seem to disrupt the reflections except for cover parts up. but that's minor and most people won't be picky over the realism of it. another thing about the reflections: the colors of the mountains and the reflections still don't match.

-okay, the default effect used on the bird silhouettes are really bugging me now...they make the birds look like floating lumps (sorry ^^;), especially for that one bird. to the left of the cluster. you are going for a magnificent feat of detail with this background, so don't slack off when it comes to the birds (you've set the bar pretty high for yourself =P). or else it kind of defeats your effort.

-please work on your lakeshore. it's currently kind of iffy. the transition isn't quite there yet, and why are there trees growing in the water?

-better waterfalls, although they still look kind of like pillars... maybe lower their opacity a tad? and you don't really need so many sources of water pouring into your lake. but anyway, for the river on the left side, you've got floating trees in the middle of it. (i still think that rivers flowing down mountainsides should have cover from the canopy of leaves provided by trees...thus they shouldn't be so visible all the way.)

hope my long posts are not too much to read >_> and as i said previously, you are improving with every update. compared to what you started out with, this latest version is definitely a lot better looking. haha, kinda makes me feel bad about being so demanding x_x keep up the good work!

Wow, its been 5 days already?! woopsie! i've lost track of time^^; i thought it was only 3 days
well another update of the wall, hopefully this is the last time i had to reextract the wall, aw well...
here's the wall:

also im answering Asa01's question "what season this is?": well im guessing sometime between summer & fall, and thanks for the advice about extracting, im not sure if it worked but it did made the scan more pretty^^

Lol, seems like the actual scenery is leaning more towards autumn and the reflection more towards summer ;P the landscape has an orangish haze to it while the reflection is nice and cool and green. please make the land itself less sepian-toned.

anyway, starting with the foreground: i think you overdid the blur because she has a bit of a brownish haze around here. when gaussian blurring the duplicate, you must keep it under 1, i think. anyway, the jagged outlines are not quite repaired as yet.

the palm leaves are much more leaf-like, but i think you can make them greener. as well, you have some aliasing problems with the right-most leaf on the tree and the single leave there in the upper right corner. as well, some of your leaves don't have full opacity, thus when they overlap, the overlapped area is darker than the rest. that must be fixed! and there is this one leave that has a bit of a problem: some detached floating bits around it, and some translucent stuff surrounding the opaque points of the leaf. i don't know if this description is apt enough to help you find it though. >_<

the rivers to either side of the wall still require more work, the right side one more so than the left side one. there are trees in them. the medium sized fall is okay, but like the larger running rivers, it's got trees floating in it. the smallest two in the center of the wall work just fine now. :]

the mountains in the distance are a tad realistic. try the median filter on them. now for the left side, the mountains seem okay, but for the right side, that part underneath the palm leaf--i can't make out its edges and what it actually looks like. it sorta resembles a brown...blob? ^^;

the horizon isn't the best because there should be changes based on perspectives for the clouds to give it that sense of distance, but that is okay. it gets a bit complicated and most people tend to not care anyway.

the thumbnail looks gorgeous and if you work more on the wall itself, it will live up to the thumbnail. and then you'll have yourself a marvelous wallpaper... you've done some great work so keep up the tireless effort! ^^

An update of my wall^^ i think i might have to reextract the scan again, so im reupdating again soon, hopefully its a little better this time.

The palm leaves still look funny...there is the transparency problem, plus the blurry parts, and the parts that look rather low quality. and palm leaf on the right side seems jagged. i'm thinking that you are using some sort of brushes? anyway, no matter what you are using, it would be easy to fix this if you could master the pen tool! (unless you can fix this some other way, necessity calls for you to vector now and not after four or five walls ;D)

and the color of the rock the girl sitting on is purple now? =/ and yeah, you'll have to re-extract the girl. what you did looks to me like you removed the outline? o__O well, that's what i see for her hair. ^^; and why does her skin look like she is smudged with green?

the waterfalls and rivers look acceptable, all but the leftmost one. the way the river branches into a fork and the way you can see the entire thing makes it not look right. >_< the middle of the form should be blocked by the trees of the piece of the hill in the middle. and be careful of the proportions of the trees' height to the river's width. you don't want your river to be too wide.

and i say reduce the visibility of the emboss effect on the birds a tad.

the furthest mountains look much better now (although the matter of them being barren is something else). and i think the clouds are covering too much so that the sky itself is invisible. your clouds look cool, but since your wall is so detailed in every aspect that it'd be nice to provide some contrast with plainer areas. just a small thought. ^^

i'm kind of in a hurry so i'm not sure if i've gone over everything i should. excuse any bad grammar or anything like that. i'm not rereading my post. keep up the great work and yeah... and i'll take to you about the text later. i've neglected to critique it all along because i wanted you to focus on the bg. anyways, i'm waiting for the next update! :D

XD And now im back with the next update!! yes i know the position of the leaves on the palm tree is weird so im gonna fix it later
i don't know if i used the pen tool right
but tell me if there's anything wrong with the leaves or anything.
its only my second time using the pen.
and now here's the update:



take your time and comment me anytime^^