Travelogue series planning

I recently finished the first in what I want to be a series of Art Deco-styled travel posters. Here's a list of other walls that I'm thinking of for the series.
In progress
Macross: Shot of a valkyrie flying through the sky, maybe over a generic cityscape.
Kino no Tabi: "The Empty Country". Vista of the Empty Country (abandoned buildings). Scan from Novel 8.
Allison: "Majestic Littony River". Vista of the Littony River (important in novel 1 of Allison) with an airplane (w/Allison and Will) flying over.
Thinking about it
Last Exile: Vanship. Over a cityscape? Possibly with the Silvanus.
Big O: Paradigm cityscape, with Big O in the background.
Gankutsuou: Paris spaceport, with spaceships taking off, rest of Paris in background.
The Cat Returns: Kingdom of Cats vista, focused on the tower.
Escaflowne: A pair of matching but contrasting posters, perfect for dualscreen setups. Fanelia vista, with Escaflowne in background. Zaibach vista, with Guymelefs in background.
Cowboy Bebop: A vista of one of the rings that is used for interplanetary travel, with Bebop, Swordfish and/or Redhawk.
Ghost in the Shell: Tachikoma, in a cyberscape?
Katamari Damacy: Vista of a city getting pwned by a katamari
Utena: Vista of the school (as seen in the movie with its sweeping/moving parts)

Hmm, got a lot of work there...

DA! v10

April is turning out to be a busy month for DA! -- 3 walls and an iGoogle skin... and I'm starting to work on the layout for DA! v10 for DA!'s 8th birthday next month. I'm going all Web 2.0-out for this layout -- lots of soft gradients and reflections everywhere. It'll be quite a change from the classical feel of the current layout, that's for sure.

Tetris iGoogle Theme

Here's my latest theme in development. I hope to finish it this weekend. As my coworker pointed out, it's too bad you can't embed sound in a theme and get it to play the Tetris theme (not that I advocate embedded sound in webpages, but it would be kinda cool as an opt-in feature for this one.)
Also, LOL!

Too many things

I need to stop adding to my work in progress notebook. Or figure out a way to make these walls in 1 hour or less.
Aiyah.

Vectorlicious + Painterlicious

My latest forays into Illustrator mavenry has been heavy utilization of the art brushes. I've use art brushes before, but mostly as accents to a greater picture; this brush-painted styled Mushishi wall uses a few art brush strokes, but mostly it's filled shapes with some tweak and roughen filters applied to them to give it the sketchy edging. There's also some calligraphic brushes in there because when you set the width to random it can mimic a varying stroke line without any work on your part - but it's unpredictable since it's the computer that decides how wide to make the outline.
However, after reading a tutorial on creating (and using) art brushes I've decided to give it more of a go. (Computer Arts magazine from the UK is really a wonderful resource. I only wish it didn't have to be shipped overseas because it makes it so expensive! Thankfully many of their articles and tutorials are reproduced on their website!) I've already done several tests and have been happy with the calligraphic style. Creating your own art brushes means you have total control over how the edges taper out or not, which is not something easily achievable with a calligraphic brush. I hope to use this technique to make several more Mushishi walls, since it's got such a rural, classic Japanese feel to it that a calligraphic brush-styled wall would complement. So far I have another Ginko wall (which will be very dark, so I may cheat on all the effects) as well as a Nui wall (which I'm thinking will be more brush-on-parchment styled, and should showcase this technique wonderfully.)
We'll see how it turns out. After all, vectorlicious and painterlicious shouldn't be mutually exclusive.

Vectorlicious vs Painterlicious

I haven't made a wallpaper without using Illustrator for some part of the wall in quite some time (since "Welcoming the Dragon" in June, to be precise.) No particular reason why except I really like playing around in Illustrator a lot more than playing around in Photoshop. Also, I've been into clean, crisp images with very few colors, and Illustrator pulls off that sort of wallpaper a lot more easily than Photoshop, and I've been choosing scans to that effect as well.
Looks like I'll finally be breaking that trend. The Mushishi scan I wanted to work with was in a very delicate watercolor style, and although I was initially tempted to try and use vectors to recreate the effect (and push Illustrator's natural brushes to their limit) I backed away from that idea because I think I've just been doing too many vectors lately. My other skills feel like they're getting rusty.
This wall will be done in a smudge-painterly style, with copious amounts of paper texture to maintain that watercolor feel. I don't do too many smudge-painterly styled walls, but it's rather relaxing to smooth out the details. In many ways it produces an image totally opposite from a vector's crisp outlines, but hey, variety is good.
I think this style will suit the Mushishi manga image much better as well.