Imagination: Wallpaper and Making Of

I’ve been away from the art of photomanipulation for years. Sure, I dabbled in it when doing bits for my web designs.. but those were just basic and used mostly for creating texture for web elements. The truth? is that I hadn’t touched it like I did today since 2005. Almost FIVE years ago.? Here?s what I was doing back then: (1, 2, 3) . Don?t laugh. :p

I still haven?t shed my love for fantasy and at the ripe age of 24 I don?t know if I ever will outgrow it.

These are all the materials I chose to work with?. and this is what I made. Click the picture for a 1920 x 1200 wallpaper:

Follow an abbreviated ‘making of’ after the break.

The Making of : Imagination.

Starting off with the hand/ball stock.	Overlaid the image with itself, increasing contrast and color intensity.
Opened the second piece of stock for use.	Used polar coordinates to distort the shape into something I can fit inside a sphere.
Placed the image into the ball, set to overlay.	Copied layer, still in overlay mode, to intensify colors.
Decided I wouldn’t use the background, even if I did like the lighting. Masked it out.	Added the red flame fractal stock, changing the hue to a blue. Positioned and warped it a bit to make it’s movement around the ball visually correct. I guess I’m no good at fluid dynamics or anything.
Added some sparkles to the ball.. and the hand. Seriously, nothing says manly hand like sparkles.	Added one butterfly at at time from this unbelievably convenient sheet and positioned them as I liked.
Added minor lighting to the butterflies to match up a little with the light direction on the hand.	I almost thought I was done at the previous step but I left it and picked it up again the next day? and I was feeling a little red. Used the same flame fractal used for the blue wisps for the red, with some minor transformations applied.
Applied butterflies with added lighting as before using this other amazing and wonderful butterfly sheet from the same stock provider.	Decided that some bokeh was in order and went searching until I found this massively useful pack. Put the purpley one in the background and trimmed and brushed away any excess bokeh spheres.
Added another bokeh from the pack, this time the one with the largest bokeh and used it to accent the brighter bokeh.	Finally applied opposing coloring to the bokeh, for contrast.

This process was totally fun and took about three days of tweaking. There were probably 30 or so major steps that were backed out from or evolved so much they basically disappeared but that’s how it is. :-)

What do you think? Like it? Dislike it? Offends your manliness? :-) Comments/Constructive Criticism greatly appreciated!

And for being awesome and reading through the entire thing, you get my special Retro 1995 Pixelated Wallpaper version. :-) Make sure you look at it at full size to get the effect. ^^