Neon Genesis Evangelion Wallpaper: Over the Limit

Next for the wall, wow so I wanted to make my wall look retro but not dated? I knew what I wanted to do and that was a scenic wall. I decided from the get go that I was going to challenge myself and do something that I would never normally do so scenic it was. I browsed and saved a ton of walls for inspiration. Picked a color scheme and scans to start with. Funnily enough I still remember how walls were back then so with that in mind I tried to restrict myself with certain things. I wanted to go with a warm color scheme even though a cool color scheme would have made my wall look what old school walls looked like back then. It was a huge struggle because I rarely work with stocks and I was on the edge the entire time since I didn't want to paint. From the beginning I decided to restrict myself with painting only using it for things like details or blending. lmao I will say that I have a really good talent for making things look painted though. I actually made a tutorial of how to fake paint (aka not from scratch, making filters look decent) a couple years ago over @ LJ. The crazy amount of filters (smart blur tyfyt) used on this wall's hilarious. Every scan/stock went through the same process of filter and some smudge. I usually first put the images through the filter and just paint around the edges to cover the pixelation from the filters. The clouds and rocks were the hardest part of this wall. Trying to work with the stock I used while keeping some type of cohesive look but not crossing the line to fully painted was honestly one of the hardest things I've ever done. Unfortunately in the original wall I worked on the sky so much that the clouds felt unnatural. It got pretty bad. I reworked them quite a lot for this version and I like them a lot in this version since wow scan.

Started off with this scan + this scan. I started by filtering them and resizing them. On the background I set a red layer to darken and erased some of the parts I didn't want colored. As I started to get more comfortable I added things as I went along. Next came the rubble which was two stocks combined. I combined the two stocks, extracted them, and colored them in with a black color so it would look like a black silhouette. Next I extracted the scans again (this time separately) and on both stocks used a ridiculous amount of smart blur, then smudged the pixelated areas. I took them after I colored them red, flipped them the opposite direction the original silhouette was in and started to arrange them. I kept duplicating certain rocks (setting them to lighten) and arranging them to look more like ruin. Bless masking tbh. Added a steel beam stock, colored it and placed it along the rocks. Eventually added a sign because why not. Colored red again and added some details with a fine brush. After I was done setting everything up I took a brush so I could paint some of the edges orange. I did that about 3 times because I couldn't get it right...yeah. Then I started working on the sky after arranging everything. I had no idea what to do for the sky. I tried a wide variety of stocks but none of them looked great? Added the sky, added the lens flare, colored Asuka and bam other things. (THE ORIGINAL WALL HAD TERRIBLE LIGHTING ON HER, I MEAN IT'S STILL AWFUL BUT IT'S A LOT BETTER NOW.) In the final version I colored it differently (CONTRAST), added some light beams, the sky was reworked to look better, added some texture made from the background scan, birds were from a brush, etc. Yeah, I'm surprised this doesn't have text.

Unfortunately for me the thing that happened was that on the last day (the day it was due) I was adding details and I fucked some things in the wall. Due to that I spent my very last day modifying the wall and making things worse leading to frustration + rushing. After that last day was almost up I noticed the time and I noticed there were some borders from resized edges from a gradient I used. Since I thought I didn't have time to fix it I quickly cropped it (the canvas was 2300x1438) to 1920x1200 and gave up. I was disappointed in my entry because I thought I could do better. I mean I kind of liked the wall but it wasn't what I wanted to make so the next day, even though I had already submitted, I decided to keep going until I got to what I envisioned. Today was finally the day I was 90-100% satisfied with it. Let it be known I'm a HUGE perfectionist. I'm rarely ever satisfied with anything I do unless it looks at least 90% of the vision I had. Everything from the other wall's there just reworked. Also this is the fourth version of the wall, yeah it's that bad. Also both walls went through a similar process so basically my sources are the same.