My Minitokyo Arete Entry, which won Honorable Mention.
Process: I extracted the character with Illustrator's pen tool before hitting upon a second idea which did not require extraction. (Doh!) Instead, I used the stamp tool to extend the picture horizontally. Then I scanned my sandlewood fan and reproduced its cut-out patterns in Illustrator. I took the finished fan and dropped it into Photoshop. For each slat of the fan I duplicated the image and rotated it slightly; each slat is rotated 1deg relative to the slat next to it. Then I added in some wood textures and played with the blending modes until I got the right painted wood effect I wanted. Add some shadows and some bevel so that the slats were more well-defined and three-dimensional and that portion was done. I wanted to make a very simple background so that the focus was entirely on the fan. At first I experimented with some repeating patterns but it felt too busy and off-skelter. Then I tried to use a wood texture, as if the fan was on top of a table, but there was not enough contrast between the wooden fan and the wooden surface. I decided to combine the two ideas, so the fan is on top of a patterned tablecloth on top of a table, which allowed me to add a spot of color and contrast to the fan and table without it looking too abstract and bizarre.
The title of this piece is fairly obvious; it's a lady and a fan. To keep with the traditional Japanese feeling I wrote the text in Japanese only, placing it so it appeared to be painted on the fan.
Purpose:
I thought it would be interesting to have the lady painted on a fan. I used to have a very nice cloth Japanese fan that had a lady painted on it, and it always made me think of The Tale of Genji. Since the contest image had a lady in a traditional Japanese kimono, I figured it only made sense to continue with the theme. I definately didn't want to make grunge or scenic (or a mixture of the two) since my previous Amano walls were like that, and it's always more fun to test out new ideas, placements, and concepts. I also didn't want to vector it because I have too many other vector projects, and one needs variety in design, as in life. Also, the hair looked like a pain to trace.The 'object on a table' design as been done before (I've done several myself) but these items are invariably photographs or postcards or drawings on paper. I don't recall seeing anyone doing a fan before. I like it because it adds a touch more three-dimensionality to it than a piece of paper ever could.
Peculiarities:
+ The wood texture in both the table and the fan was shamelessly ripped out of my FMA "Central Times" wall because I didn't want to go looking for new wood textures.
+ That the curve of the lower cutouts in the fan matches with the curve of the lady's shoulder is entirely coincedental. I had dropped the fan in, resized it appropriately, then dropped in the scan at 100%, and lo and behold, after moving it around a bit, they fit almost perfectly! Why mess with a good thing?
+ At one point the file size was over 900mb. (This was, of course, because I was working at the original size of the scan and had 21 copies of it; one for each slat. Really, don't try this at home, unless you like waiting five minutes for Photoshop to save.) Kalico laughed at me when I told her.
+ One of the slats didn't get rotated properly. Oops. It was in the middle of a set, too, so by the time I noticed I had already merged it with the other slats and it was too late to change it. I'd already had to remake the entire fan twice, I wasn't going to remake it a third time, even if during the second time I realized how to prevent the file from reaching 900mb.
Additional resolutions are available at DA! Desktop Anime