Tales of the Windy Prairie

After long hours of coming back and forth in Photoshop for this, IT'S FINALLY DONE! My attempt, as usual, to keep a larger project going under the smaller ones. Heavily inspired by Ghiblicious backgrounds and Gusty character design, I went off for a project that apparently has less artificial structures and more natural ones.

While I'm still not able to draw prettyful trees and individuals leaves of plants, (doubt I ever will; no time!) I at least want to get the general concept into place first! Along with this was also to apply some slight inspiration from photographic exposure and attempting to draw from two influential light sources at once (hence the white highlight on the girl and some objects). After some time I got tired of the experiment however, I suddenly had more fun putting together the backdrop of grass and rock than attempting to fix every single detail anywhere else!

This was also a test of my idea in balancing time-saving with details - a technique exclusively only for the digital medium as I quite seriously wanted to use purely traditional techniques. I'd say why not use technology (post-processing) to make things prettier if it actually does?

Now for the picture itself! Nothing more exotic than a girl talking to her pet flying dolphin, aye? (WHAT DRUGZ DID YOU USED?!!11elevenone) I wanted a touch of surrealism on the image and at the same time, the scale of a fantasy backdrop to make things even grander - this was the result! This is also my usual tirade with attempting to integrate some amounts of 'global illumination' with anime style proportions.