Kimono Anime

I am a little embarrassed to admit how long it took me to make this from scratch. I am guessing over the past 4 months I have worked on this about 100 hours. I think pros could have done a much better job in a fraction of the time, but you have to start somewhere.

Ninety percent of this was done using the pen tool and the other ten percent was done using the brush tool. I used over forty reference pictures both of anime and real life photos. This took over 2000 layers to complete. My computer got so bogged down I had to merge everything together into a new file every 500 or so layers. I ended up with four Photoshop files each with a separate piece of the picture, and every time I wanted to change something it was a little bit of a pain. I then combined all the merged files into a single file.

I wanted to make this because I thought it would be a good learning opportunity for me. I learned a lot. I added all of the kimono decorations and flowers last, and by the time I got to that point I was much faster and could move through Photoshop much quicker than when I started this monster.