Birthday Gift for =Shadowhog
_{The whole family came to celebrate~ 8D}

[EDIT]: Removed transparency because DA messed it up again.

Whow, I guess I almost killed myself (and my PC) with trying to finish this in time.
I actually don't want to know how much time has been wasted for plain waiting just because my PC, including internet and especially Photoshop was way too slow and took forever for a single brush stroke.
I ended up sitting in front of it working with a headache for the last few hours and the happier am I to have finally finished it.

Well, for those who don't know:
Here we have my character Maria the Hedgecat and =Shadowhog's character Luther the Hedgehog (most of you might know these two at least, I guess) and their children Sharon and Travis at the age of about 5.
With this picture I thought of some kind of these... photos they take of you holding a frame around yourselves. Yet, this picture ended up being more like a mixture of a simple photograph in a frame and one of "those" photos... XD
Anyway... just shut down your rational thinking and enjoy~ 8D ... *shot*

__About the Picture:__

Seriously, once again the idea for this picture hit me at night-time about a week ago and right the next morning I started to draw this. I was still very ambitious to draw something proper I can be proud of again after having noticed that I've become worse in art lately.
And yes, I AM proud of this. First of all I draw like almost never more than two characters in a picture, especially not on one piece of paper. And secondly, things that I didn't get to draw very well in previous pictures turned out pretty nice again, as for example the hands.
I gotta say, I really like Maria the most. For some odd reason I managed to draw her face, her expression, her hair, everything exactly as it has to be.

For shading I decided to try out something new. I just had the urge to use some different shading.. something... more.. how to say. spectacular? Well, it didn't really turn out that way, but at least it looks better than simple cell shading. At least to me... o.o;
Yet, everything has it's price, and the price for this shading style were many layers and a lot of time... I actually didn't have. But I put this birthday gift in the first place because I really wanted to finish it.
Therefor, I saved on the background. Well I couldn't think of anything else to add anyway. I mean... it's actually a kind of photo... what do you expect?! XDD

I guess, I have to say a few things...
I know I've been pretty much of a bitch the past year. But it wasn't easy for me to cope the whole situation, even though I often made it look like I don't care about it too much.
It's been really hard for me... so hard that I couldn't even imagine you being close to me in any way anymore, so I needed distance... a lot of distance... but now I think I pretty much mastered it so far.
I never meant to hurt you.. although I knew I would...
All I can say is I'm sorry.
And I hope you enjoy this little Birthday gift anyway.

Happy Birthday =Shadowhog!


Luther ©
Maria, Sharon, Travis & Art ©

_{::about ::
Done in Adobe Photoshop CS3
Original Size: 2680x1963 px
Layers: 189
Time Taken: 19-20 hours}