My objective with this wallpaper was to "remaster" this scan so that it could be used as a wallpaper. I felt that the composition of the image was complete enough to be used as a wallpaper without any further editing. Unfortunately, the scan is very grainy and not very high resolution. The image is also not large enough to make a widescreen wallpaper from it. And so, for these reasons, I set about doing my first ever vector in Illustrator.

In order to support widescreen, I scoured the Internet for other versions of this image. Eventually, I found some other versions that showed larger extents of the painting. They were very small but they would have to do. I created a composite image of all the best parts of the various images I had and used that as my guide to create the vector.

Learning the pen tool in Illustrator was actually quite easy. I followed some tutorials and found it to be very intuitive. It took me about a week of working in the evenings to create all the outlines. When I had finished them, I was very pleased with my achievement but the thought of tackling the immense task of doing the colour was too much for me and I put the project on the back-burner until such time as I was feeling up to the challenge.

The date I began creating the outlines was 2 August 2008. Over 8 months later, on 10 April 2009, I finally completed this wallpaper. During those 8 months, I had about 3 or 4 stints of 2 to 5 days each where I made progress with the wallpaper before being distracted by other things. I also did another quick project during that time, which I never uploaded to the main gallery because I decided it was not good enough.

The large majority of this wallpaper was created in Illustrator. I made extensive use of gradient meshes and a few Gaussian blurs on certain paths to maintain the soft painterly quality of the skin and other areas where there were no hard transitions from light to shadow. One particularly challenging area to do was Syaoran's glove, which is cut off in the high-resolution scan. Working out how it should look based on the blurry extended area of my composite image was quite hard and bending the gradient meshes to my will was also tricky in that area. The characters eyes also took an enormous amount of time to do in Illustrator but I was determined to do them using vectors so that the final product could be infinitely scalable. Only the background sky and the glow effect were done in Photoshop.

Alternate version

This new version has the addition of some grass to create a curved horizon line and gives the scene some context (although somewhat abstract) and helps place the characters within the environment. It's only available in widescreen resolutions because the grass has little to no effect on the narrower formats.

Preview:


Downloads:
2560 x 1600 (JPEG Quality: 72)
1920 x 1200 (JPEG Quality: 88)
1680 x 1050 (JPEG Quality: 95)
1440 x 900 (JPEG Quality: 95)
1280 x 800 (JPEG Quality: 95)

Cool extra stuff

Here's a wireframe view of the vector.