Wow. Just. Wow. I can't believe I finished this in time! O__O I've been so busy with work work and class work...finding time to work on this has been tough, but totally worth it. :] I've been working on it for roughly 2 weeks...err...an hour or two a day, when I can find it lol. Reminder to self: Do not take on a vector/painted wallpaper with such little time to do it in, especially when you haven't vectored/painted a wall in 2 years! Lol.

Sooo this is the great summer challenge. Well, how did I come up with Sakura...I've been playing Project X Zone, and the Sakura Wars/Taisen characters are in it. Well, some of them. That series will always have a wonderfully warm place in my heart as one of the earlier anime I saw...one of my first...and I played all of the games, imported in japanese on Dreamcast (So at least 10 years ago?? My brother got them). Lol. Reading Japanese isn't one of my strong points. >> But I still managed haha. Ah, the good old days. Anyhoo, those good old days flooded back, and so I decided to skim through the SW scans. :)

This scan hit me first. I decided to go gutsy and vector it. I was going to just vector and paint straight from the scan, but then I came across this one! She's in a swimming suit! Ah, summer perfection lol! XD Sooo I did something I never did before, which was combine the two scans (first scan for her head and bg, second for her body). Getting the proportions right was the hardest part...the vectoring wasn't too painful until I got to the highlights and shading, so I enlisted the help of Oli-chan (to whom this wall is dedicated). She helped map out where that all would go. :) Since the lighting is different in the two scans...I wasn't sure where the shading and such would go lol, but she was super amazing and helped me. <3 [Thank you, girl!!] So yeah, as you can see, I changed the colors up as well. I hated the yellow/white swimsuit on her. << I mean, why yellow? Her color is always pink! So yeah, changed it all to pink, even her traditionally red bow. Also prettied her up with some makeup and painted nails lol.

I used the first scan as reference for the background...which was very hard...lol...it's been a long time since I used my tablet for anything like this, and I gotta say, I am not a fan of waves! First time painting a wave, and I know it has a loooot of issues. <<' Ehhh. To help bring some things together, I added a nice warm hue on top of it all. Don't worry, I'll share the original blue one here, too. I just liked the warmer one more. :)

This wallpaper took a lot of layers lol...and work, but yeah, I am happy with it. I hope you like it, too! <3 Enjoy. (I'll get some more resolutions up when I can.)

• Plain Vector of Sakura (please don't use it without my permission, thanks!)
• Plain/Original Coloring of Wallpaper