Once upon a time, I watched an anime titled "Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo." (Don't ask me how to pronounce that.) It's is, indeed, The Count of Monte Cristo, but moved to a steampunk-ish sci-fi setting, and given some trippy animation. Seriously, the whole show looks like this:
Notice there's little to no shading, and nearly everything is colored in with some kind of texture or pattern. The show was a little darker than what I usually go for, and it was told from the point of view of Albert, (the son in the story, and the kid in the picture above,) who was annoyingly emotional most of the time. So, to be quite honest, I watched it for the art style. (And for Albert's friend Franz, who was the only person in the show besides the count who was competent in any way. He rocked.) It's been on my to-do list ever since to do some kind of picture that imitated that style. I just never really figured out what that picture would be.
Some time later I discovered an art style called minimalism. I really don't know how to describe minimalism, so here, have an example:
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| kuabci.deviantart.com |
Honestly, I never had any intention of doing anything in this style. I just really liked it, and logged it away in my brain under the label "Things that Look Cool."
I own a nook, which I quite like. (This is all related, I swear.) It comes with a few wallpapers for your screen, but nothing very impressive. I finally decided it would be cool to make my own, and to do something related to my favorite book characters (in hopes that seeing them would inspire me to read and not just play the sudoku app.) So, I reached into that pile in my brain, fished around a little bit, and pulled out this:
Erik, aka The Phantom of the Opera, Inspector Javert (Les Miserables), Sherlock Holmes, and Percy Blakeney (The Scarlet Pimpernel). (There's so much space at the bottom because the nook puts a row of icons down there. I managed to get the spacing so that they fit pretty comfortably in the free space on the screen.)
This was one of those projects that, the farther along I got in making it, the more I realized there were easier ways of doing it. Even by the end, I was probably making things more complicated than they needed to be. So, suffice it to say that this happened in photoshop, with pictures of the characters combined with pictures of fabric.
Finding pictures of the characters standing full length was by far the hardest part. The Phantom and Holmes saved me by being popular enough to have Halloween costumes, and those were the only full length images of them I could find. Javert came from a book illustration. Percy was a pain in the butt. His top half came from a book cover, and the bottom half from a picture of a period costume sewing pattern.
Finding pictures of fabric was the most time-consuming part, but also kinda the funnest part. The background is a stock image of old paper.
So, yes, now my nook has awesome wallpaper, and I'm pretty happy about that. It was really time consuming, but really fun, too.
Peace out, gang!
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Bonus ramble, if you want to stick around to hear it.
Making this was strangely nostalgic for me, because, a few summers ago, I did a lot of fanfiction writing about these guys... all together... in one story.
I really wanted to write something, but didn't have any good ideas. So just to scratch the itch, I started doing these little drabbles in which a teenage girl named Michelle had the ability to enter the world inside of books and bring characters back out with her if she wanted to. These four guys practically lived with her. All the little scenes I wrote were plot-less, pointless, inconsistent, and out of order, but they kept me entertained. Erik was well-behaved because Michelle bribed him with an ipod. (Oh, did he love his ipod!) Javert hated him, unsurprisingly, but Holmes kinda liked him because he was interesting, intelligent, and played the violin. (Holmes still watched him like a hawk, though.) Percy just kinda hung around, cool as a cucumber, being a bit of a goof sometimes.
I don't even remember now what kind of stuff I wrote. I think some of it was melodramatic. Javert was taken from the end of his story, which is a very unfortunate ending for him, and had some lingering issues that crept up once in a while. And Erik... was Erik. But mostly it was just silly stuff, like everyone being really impressed with the microwave, except Holmes broke it because he started putting random stuff in it just to see what would happen.
And, yeah, I just felt like sharing.
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