Heart of Darkness

No, normally I don't do heart designs, but I've been playing Kingdom Hearts 2 a lot lately (and by "a lot lately" I mean "started over and beat it on Proud over the past week"), so a heart-themed pic was just waiting to happen. I decided to go with a tribal-ish design because it reminded me of the KH2 logo (even though it wasn't tribal, but the 'II' part made it look tribal if you only took a quick glance) and because I can't bring myself to do a standard heart - it wouldn't be dark or depressing enough.

Another factor in the creation of this was the band Nightwish. I've been listening to them again, and one of my favorite songs by them is Nemo. My loving heart, Lost in the dark, For hope I'd give my everything.... That all led to the gradient and tribal-ish background.

Drawn by hand, first half the heart and background (without the gradient) together, then traced off separately (easier Photoshop tinkering), scanned, colored, Photoshopped together, mirrored, added the gradient and used the Blur More filter to (hopefully) help get rid of the nasty pixelation the scanning left me with. >.<

If the Blur More didn't work as well as I'm hoping, I still have the layered PSD to try to fix it with.

Questions? Comments? Critiques? All are welcome. ^.^


Edit: Re-tinkered the thing, replacing Blur More with a Gaussian Blur... seems to have helped out a lot, but maybe your monitors will pick up stuff mine doesn't. O.o` If it still looks nasty in fullview, let me know and I'll dig out the PSD again.