Started walling probably a few years ago but it was mostly a "cut and paste," add text kind of thing, and I got bored of it quite quickly... So, this is my first serious wallpaper! To be honest, I really didn't know what I was getting into. I thought it would take an hour or so... it actually ended up being probably 5+!

I extracted and cleaned the image using Shinta's tutorial (http://imanimetions.net/main.php) which was really helpful^^. The extraction took a really long time though since I was doing it on my laptop without a mouse (one of those touch pad things... I wouldn't recommend it...)

The first version was pretty simple; scan of Sakura on a sort of blue cloud background. The second version (this one) was cleaned up a lot better and I added the swirl to the background to make it more interesting. I drew a bunch of diagonal lines and used filter, wave to make them overlap a bit and filled in some parts with a pattern. It took me a while to figure it out, but I think the effect is pretty cool.

Thanks to everyone in Session Zero that helped me out with this!