A Gankutsuou wall without floofy floral patterns? What gives? Well, dare to be different, I always say. I downloaded the scan because I was always fond of the Eugenie/Albert relationship, and as I began to trace it I noticed the outlines were thick and dynamic, almost like a painting. So instead of the typical over-the-top frills, I decided to use a much different style - Art Nouveau. I've been meaning to make some more walls in the Nouveau style (I had two recently that never got anywhere) and decided that it would be a good fit - after all, The Count of Monte Cristo is a French novel and Art Nouveau was a mainly European art movement, with a good portion of it in France. I based the framing on Alphonse Mucha's style of framing, tracing over several of his posters. To keep with that poster feel I didn't add any extra detail, just some textures to give that paperish poster feeling. Sadly, I didn't get to use gradient mesh on the characters to get the shading. I have another gradient mesh project that's a lot more intense than this image, so I figured for expediency's sake, Gaussian blurs would work just as well. (Except Illustrator does weird stuff to anything blurred past 20 pixels. Just so you know.)
Title based on the opening theme.
More resolutions at DA! Desktop Anime. This was actually the first wall in which I planned for all 3 (widescreen, 4x3 and 5x4) resolutions in the design of the frame. You'll note that the frame cuts off in just the right places for each size without any bleed over. That took some thinking to do, let me tell you!
For Candy-chan, my Art Nouveau comrade-in-arms.