All done now.

Here’s the original, “Softly as in a morning sunrise” By Satoshi Matsuyama.

And here’s mine, “Softly as in a morning sunrise” by me.

And, because the original artist is so enthusiastic about presenting the image in full res glory, rather than only presenting resized versions for the web, here it is.

It’s very tough to get absolutely everything perfect for that kind of size, especially as I’m used to creating images that are more likely to squeeze neatly onto a monitor, and clearly not everything is absolutely perfect, due to time constraints, but I could at least see how much devotion the artist needs to have in order to attain the quality of work that he creates. I’ve tried to follow it very closely, using techniques that the artist employs, including the use of both high res photos, and drawn objects such as the tree and birds. I would have used photos of birds but every time I set my camera up towards my window, they all decided to hide away. So screw them, I can make my own. They don’t want to be in my picture, that’s fine by me.

It was very important to get the vibrancy in colour just right, though admittedly, this is easier to do when working from a “template”, as the original image was to me, than building up the colours from scratch. Starting with the background is a good idea, as it determines the precise colours and shades that the foreground objects need to have, and the red sky and almost white sun are key to the colour in this whole image. Overall, I’m very pleased with it.