Reach for Love

• Widescreen 16:10 – 1920×1200
• Standard 4:3 – 1600×1200
• Square 5:4 – 1280×1024
• Wallpaper Pack – Original “Cool” Blue Version

Being sick and having insomnia isn’t really good for anything but walling.

Anyways, this is in many ways a labor of love. I’m (re)obsessed with Kimi ni Todoke right now – I can’t stop re-reading the manga and I wish season 2 episodes would come out faster, despite the fact that I know things are going to get pretty bad in the anime soon. The moment I saw this Kimi ni Todoke scan it was instant love – it just captured the relationship between Sawako and Kazehaya perfectly. So I started to vector the outlines and was planning to go all out with textures/painting in Photoshop, but about halfway through I fell in love with how clean the vectors looked. So, for the first time, I sat down seriously to get the gradients and shading right in Illustrator. I’m ashamed to say that in almost five years of walling, I’ve never took the time to learn how to properly work gradients and the gradient mesh tool in Illustrator. The results are really rewarding, and it turned out to be a good thing that I got the wall to look how I want in Illustrator, because (again for the first time) I hit a “not enough memory” error message that I couldn’t overcome when trying to export the .ai file to Photoshop ^^;

I also used this scan to reference the outlines for Kazehaya, Sawako, and parts of the background.

(Finally managed to stop texture-whoring, w00t!!!)

P.S. Edited Kazehaya’s pants and took out the spot on Kazehaya’s shirt, thanks to dolce-yasmin and KakashiM! Also, I caved to popular pressure and made a version with warmer colors ^^;