"the four seasons"

Inspiration: During a gloriously long discussion I was having with on all things Gunslinger Girl, I thought it'd be neat to try and portray four of the main characters, each surrounded by the season that best suits them.

Concept: Being confronted with multiple lighting conditions, there was no way to do a regular shot without things looking really off, so I had to go curvilinear. Read more about the process here

Solution: Using Google Sketch-up, I built the rough shapes of the city architecture, screencapped it, and then tweaked it in Photoshop (Filter - Distort - Spherize). I went back in and guesstimated the character lineart, layered that onto the screencap, and painted everything in from there. And just because it's always good for a laugh, here are ALL my layers for the .psd file ;D

All in all, I think it came out well...! I've found out while working on it that the curvilinear perspective also creates a cool little optical illusion:

If you have the image taking up the whole screen, you can stand back and move back and forth and the image will actually seem to match your POV. This effect is known as "parallax" (of course my drawing is just a paltry imitation of how it really works) ^~;;

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Rico (spring), Triela (summer), Henrietta (autumn), Angelica (winter) © Yu Aida

<sub>Triela's all like YAY-
Making a face like Sei.
But that's okay-
Let's pretend Mimi made her that way.

...Angelica kinda looks like Shiori. WHUT.</sub>