Duck and a Clock Tower Wall
Duck and a Clock Tower Wall.
For Duck, I started with a fairly small-sized JPEG format image of Duck. The first step for vectoring is to drop the color count down to as few as reasonably possible, then edit any parts by hand, pixel by pixel, to ensure they resemble the original image closely enough before converting to vector. This was the second most time consuming part (the most time consuming being finding a photo to use).
Finding the right backdrop for this wallpaper was quite an exercise. The conditions of searching for a background photo are: 1) I search on Flickr (are there any other good sources which meet the latter conditions?), 2) I only search for photos with a Creative Commons license for free use and modification, 3) the photo has to be decent or better quality at a large size (hopefully at least 1280×1024 pixels in size), 4) the image must be wide, not tall, 5) there must be no people (unless it works for the atmosphere, or they can be cleanly removed), and 6) if the series requires it, no modern technology (cars, powerlines).
I looked for old German villages. I tried for ballet halls. I checked for castles. I viewed shopping strips. Naturally, clock towers were searched. Observation: clock tower photos tend to be tall, rather than wide. This makes sense, of course, what with clock towers being tall, not wide.
I spent a long time searching before finding Beppie K‘s Clock tower, Maastricht. Not only does this photo have a clock tower, a main item in Princess Tutu, but the bulk of the tower is reminding of the wall surrounding Duck’s town in the series.
One objective I had in creating this wallpaper was to put black lines on the top in bottom similar to a “widescreen” format movie as seen on a normal television. This should allow the wallpaper to be spread across my laptop’s desktop losing only the black bars. (I haven’t actually tried it on my yet, however…)
Another objective was to make the background have a fairytale feel to it, as well as a slightly cartoonish feel. Hopefully the tower stones look outlined like a cartoon. I didn’t capture the fairytale feel as strongly as I wanted, but it’s much closer to my vision than the original photograph. I still have a lot to learn about changing the look and “feel” of a photograph.
I didn’t want to sacrifice the height and width of the original photo much, so the final image is a rather large PNG image. I wanted to preserve the detail of Duck, so I chose PNG over JPEG (as I always do for these wallpapers). Hopefully this large filesize doesn’t inconvenience anyone interested in downloading it!
Image Data
This wallpaper uses a photo titled “Clock tower, Maastricht” by Beppie K. (More photos by Beppie.)
License
This wallpaper is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Meta Data
Dimensions are 2000 x 1500 pixels (1:1.33 ratio). Format is PNG. File size is 3.3 MB.
