Bakemonogatari Wallpaper: Night Life

My entry for first round of MT contest, where the theme forbidden vectoring. It's quite simply wall because unlucky for me, round duration overlapped mostly with my vacation, so I ended up doing it in 2 days after coming back.

I'm not too happy with how I extracted scan, and I don't even thing rush had much to do with it, I just got kinda rusty at it :P I'm pretty happy with background through, the effect is close to what I hoped to achieve.

Looks like it was enough to make it to round 2, so wish me luck with getting through it :)

Scans used:

Bakemonogatari#636820

Festival in Road

There's also a colorful, alternative version that you can check out at http://www.brokentone.net/#!Wall/152 :)

Oh, and a note to judge who said "I think the sunglasses seen a bit out of place since it is a night scene.". I was completely blown away by the fact I haven't realized that earlier xD

I'm sorry about that, but I'll also use this description to get something off my chest. Hopefully, since I made it to round 2, this won't sound like a rant of a loser. I didn't enjoyed the theme of this round at all. I thought I will when I saw it at first, it made a good impression on me. I use vectoring on almost all my walls, but I also like challenges and getting out of comfort zone. Retro theme made it completely justified to forbid vectoring, and I didn't felt bad about that. I browsed some old wallpapers, analyzing what were common themes and techniques on them (you might not realize how often huge moon appeared for example!) and it was fun to come up with concept. Working with raw scans, "renders" and brushes is how I began walling too, it makes a cliche theme but still fun. However, my impression changed when I learned extensive painting is allowed. I asked some old walling friends what they thought and they shared my opinion that it's no very fair - vectoring and painting are both techniques that are relatively new. When you think about retro wallpapers, elements mentioned earlier comes to mind - "renders", raw scans, stuff like that. To me, at that point it changed from "going retro" to "no vectoring" theme. I imagined if I was more of a painting waller, I could probably just continue whatever WIP I was doing and it would be ok.

After entries were posted I was pleased to see that people actually did tried to make their wallpapers looks retro. Most of them are more retro than mine, since I kinda stopped focusing on that aspect so much after my prior disappointment in rules (so long huge moon!). I'm glad participants stayed true to theme and produced so much nice entries :) I just wish rules themselves would be more true to theme as well since for me a bit of bad aftertaste remains.