I made this wallpaper with one purpose in mind: to get some practical use with the gradient mesh tool. I've been using Illustrator since version 5 and never found the courage to try it out, for although it is very powerful (really great vector artists can acheive near photo-quality images with it) it is very complex and hard to control.
In order to force myself to learn, I picked out a PlanetES image because it had lots of soft color changes and gradients, and began experimenting.
Along the way I learned a lot that didn't work well and a few things that did. And here is the result. As a crash course in mesh tool, it's not bad. All the gradients in this trace are done using mesh, even in instances were a simple linear/radial gradient would have sufficed.
The Earth image is from NASA's website. I was so not going to trace that. Google Image Search for the win.
I know nothing about PlanetES; I chose the scan because it was on my hard drive, and I thought the concept of the image as a reflection was interesting. To that extent I did not add in the portion of Hachimaki's back, instead having the image a pure reflection, so that it's almost like it's your reflection - you are floating up to dock at a space station, or something like that (like I said, no idea what PlanetES is about, although I wouldn't mind watching it if I ever had time.)
As for the title, well, it's the name of a popular tv show. Why not.
Additional resolutions will be uploaded in the near future to DA! Desktop Anime