Heaven and Hell [WIP]

Hi everyone,

I've been working on this wallpaper for a few days now and I am a bit out of ideas at the moment. :paint:

I started with a scanned pencil sketch by an unknown artist (I'm not quite sure where I got it from). The wallpaper design and the character coloring is by me. I know that the chara needs some shadows and highlights, but since I suck at that I've postponed it till I learn a bit more about it. :read:

However, aside of the chara coloring, I think it still lacks something.

What do you think, any ideas? :help2:

Have fun,
Elfenstein.

Edit: Imagehoster-Link removed and WP added as an attachment. Don't know what the problem was some hours ago, but I could add it without problems now.
Edit2: Changed WP against version with shaded character. Left one is the newest.

Yeah, please add it to the forum when you can. Thanks!

Great concept! Couple of tweeks though: It is really hard to read "heaven" because the blur is bright. How about lowing it a bit? Also, the "fire" text seems squished in the corner. If you move the character to the middle, it will help spread things out a bit.

Yeah, you're right, the placement of the "Hell" text was way off. :thanks:
I tried moving the chara to the middle, but I really didn't like the result. Instead I've moved the whole text to the left. I like this new position and think it is well balanced with the character. What do you think?

This actually improved the wp quite a bit in my opininom, but I am still slightly unsure about the black bars. I usually use bars in my WPs since I like the 16:9 look on 4:3 screens. But something's still lacking there.

Maybe I will try some brushes, patterns or gradients there tomorrow, though not much. My goal is more of an overall simple and clean look for the WP.

Thanks for the advice, :D
Elfenstein.

I love the black bars, so I would keep them. Moving the text made things 100% better.

Maybe you could try flipping the girl. Not the whole wall but just the girl flip her postion horizontally. and look at all the positions and pick which you think is best. That's what I do when I make sigs and avys and so on. So maybe the girl might not be in the best position or maybe it is, but if it isn't that might be what's bothering you.

I began to put some preliminary shadows and highlights on the character (see first post). The result is not perfect but I think it improves the WP a lot. I am not fully satisfied with the shading but I guess thats the best I can get for now. After all, that's the first time at all that I am coloring a drawing.

I tried flipping and moving the chara some, but the current position looks best. Anyway, I decided to call the WP the final version for now. I don't know what bugged me about it, but it is gone for now. I've probably just worked to long in a row on it. Maybe I will improve it more when I've honed my skills a bit. Nevertheless, I think the current result is not half bad. At least good enough for me to use it as one of my many wallpapers on my own desktop.

This being said, I'm still glad for any advice or tips about it. So fire away. :p

Oh, and Pooky: Thanks again for the tip about the position of the text, that really helped. :laugh:

Cya,
Elfenstein.

i hate to say it but this is the weirdest wally i ever seen but looks cool in another way. hmm there's no defininte background (u kno a doorway to hell or heaven just a few examples). but overall great wallpaper.

Glad you liked it. :)

The background is simple and mostly empty intentionally. You focus more on the character and the text this way. And it should kind of symbolize the nice and clean things associated with heaven ... but on the other hand, maybe a picture of heaven's gate on very low opacity overlaid would look nice. Got to try this.

Btw, what do you find weird about it? The idea behind it or something about the execution? :laugh:

Have fun,
Elfenstein.

sorry about the weird part. i took a peek at the wallpaper again and it was just me.