I see the lights

Having made the flovely =Kyramy a Tangled inspired icon for the OC heart project, I was inspired to go on and create a larger emoticon piece capturing the lantern scene from the film in far greater detail. I started this late last night and then went on to spend a good few hours this afternoon/evening working on it to complete the piece.

At first the idea of pixelling a castle and water at night time was a little daunting, so I gave myself a helping hand and shrank down a reference image to help create the outline of the castle. Once I had the basic structure I went on to shade it in a similar way to the icon, but placing more thought and care into how different areas of the castle would light up compared to others.

Next I went on to shade the sky using colours once again based on the icon version and worked my socks off trying to come up with a style of clouds which looked natural and fitted the piece. I then added in the lanterns using several different transparency setting to help give a sensation of distance. Lastly I worked on the lower half adding in the boat and emotes along with the water and reflections (also through the use of a lot of transparency).

I'm really happy with how the final piece turned out, especially all of the clouds. There are of course areas I feel I could improve (using less transparency and fewer different colours being 2 points) but I definitely feel it's one of my best pieces so far.

<sub>Once again, many thanks to =Kyramy and *MerelyCubed for their continued support and input on the piece as it was being created <4

Credit
Castle: [link]
Inspiration: [link] and [link]</sub>