Here is my AnimePaper submission #2! When I found this scan of Horo, it was another of those images I knew instantly I would have to wall. It is from an advertisement for the Spice & Wolf game for Nintendo DS and it had some text over it; as well as some illustrated leaves. I edited that stuff out and redrew a couple of areas, then extracted the image.

When I think of Horo, the first thing that comes to mind is wheat, so I decided I would put her in front of a wheat field. Since I did not want to use brush or vector wheat, I chose to use this stock image. I chopped the sky off of the photograph so that I could make the sky in my wallpaper from scratch. After many filters and layer modes and such I got the wheat looking how I wanted it to. To the sky I added clouds, a few birds, a light rainbow, some rays of sun and mountains along the horizon. Once I completed the background, I felt there needed to be one more very special element. Since Horo's hair is blowing in the wind, I wanted to add something blowing along with it, and I knew dandilion seeds would be perfect! They are a small thing, but I think that they added so much to the wall in terms of dynamics and atmosphere. I can almost feel the breeze when I look at it. That is just the feeling I wanted to portray. The last thing I did was add a very basic paper texture to the whole wall, which I felt added a much needed uniformity to everything in terms of pulling all of the separate elements of the background and foreground together.

For some reason I couldn't stop editing this wall and tweaking the coloration of it, so I'm going to hurry up and submit it before I decide to change it 10 more times. (If I don't, it'll never get uploaded..)

Horo fans, please enjoy this wallpaper!


EDITS:

RE: The Rainbow
So, everyone hates the rainbow. I edited it and made it even lighter, but I am not satisfied with how the wall looks if I take it out entirely. :/ Maybe I'll change my mind later, but for now it stays in a subtle form.


RE: The Scan
The scan of Horo was thoroughly cleaned, however a texture was used on the whole wall so you may think otherwise. Believe me, this wall looks better with the texture than without. :)