fig tree

It's been a while since I've made any sort of wallpaper, let alone anime ones. But intense feels for Katanagatari coupled with its beautiful ED sequence is a powerful motivator.

Presenting:

(I uploaded in its original size in case anyone wants it)

Unfortunately this wasn't a case of taking a screenshot and being down with it, since aspect ratios meant that there was a black bar of roughly 50px on the top and bottom. Originally I tolerated those bars for a couple of days, but they really did look ugly. Bad enough for me to overcome my reluctance to patch them up.

Luckily about 50% was super simple. The patch tool solved most of those. But then I came to the section with flowers, and that was not simple. I ended up using a combination of straight copy & paste and the patch tool to fill up the large areas. Then it's about half an hour of manually painting in details. I'm rather terrible at digitally painting, especially on a track pad (well at least the new macbooks are stepping in the direction of pressure sensitivity). In the end, I slapped on a couple of textures and my favourite trick (taught by Donna and Eva way back in middle school) of duplicating the layer and setting it on soft light. The textures helped tremendously in hiding my ugly paint job.

Furthermore, here's a Ruler of the Land (another manga whose art style is so much more polished now that we're 60 volumes in) wallpaper that demonstrates the true power of the patch tool.

The original image was only 50% as wide, all of the left hand side is patched. Another amazing feature I used is the content awareness transform to stretch the ground a little.

I am in awe for Adobe's code. If I was in compsci, my dream company would be Adobe...then Autodesk. I started learning Revit today, and damn I wish some features carried over to AutoCAD.