I'm not a Byakuya fan (Renji ) but I'm dedicating this one to all the fangirls (Tate? :D)/boys out there lol. All started off with the Soul_Society Livejournal community contest I won. I received a Japanese magazine where there was a nice picture of Byakuya that screamed to me "vector me oh great sandy!" XD Click here for the original scan I made.

As you can see, it was meant to be vector: recolouring and redrawing the missing and covered parts by the text. The vector took me roughly 4 days. I know I'm slow but I'm making the thickness of the outlines manually and not with a custom brush so it takes some time. =_=;

Now onto the scene itself. When I saw the picture, I knew right away what I wanted to do with it. Something simple and pure, I wanted to make it exactly like his shikai performance in the anime with no painted background to give it a dramatic aspect. Just Byakuya and his zanpakutou surrounded by "sakura petals". I gave it a few more FX to make it more spiffy (fog, glowing aura, rays of light, reflection of the sword in his eyes, etc.) and decided to make it "in the process", that is not with the blade completely disappeared, to have a dynamic scene.

I used different photoshop textures to fake the reiatsu ("spiritual pressure"), all for the dramatic effect's sake.

I've decided to make it lavanda and not pink like in the anime because pink looks a bit... well... gay. XD

I placed the petals with parsimony to not break the balance of the composition.

About the title (which is the actual summoning sentence "Chire, Senbonzakura"), I would have, at first, placed it bottom middle but I think I did this too many times before so I've decided to use the fact that Japanese writing can be used vertically to place it at a perfect place to the left (it gives balance to the composition, the scarf on the right side dividing the space in two).
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More resolutions available at http://gallery.driftingheart.net