I so should not be doing this at this point of time (while working), but I'm human and I need a break.

This is the long-awaited Alice: Madness Returns (AMR) wall of mine. I'd like to think that it is "highly anticipated", but honestly, who am I kidding.

As I mentioned in my Hobby Horse scrap, this was inspired by the Hobby Horse. Alice's rather graceful Hobby Horse combo and the whinny of the Horse, for some strange reason, are rather fascinating. Unfortunately, I believe this wall was defeated (?) by poor planning.

The initial idea was to have the Hobby Horse, the checked floor, and the words "Madness Returns" as a 3D grayish thing with bloodstains on the floor. Then, I kept thinking, "Madness Returns" is rather cliché when it comes to AMR, so I crawled through the artbook to get some ideas. I then picked out some random monsters, but decided that they were too difficult, and then turned to Google. After finding some fantastic pictures of the Vorpal Blade, I decided to include it in. I then went back to the artbook and finally picked out a picture of the clock, from the Hatter's Domain. Then, I remembered that poker cards featured prominently in the prelude to Queensland, so I decided to put them in. I'm sure that it is obvious why I picked the King and Queen of Hearts. As for the Ace…that's because the King and Queen were tedious enough as it was to vector, so I just picked something easier.

The title changed too. It went from "Madness Returns" to "Choose Your Battles Wisely" to the one here. "Choose your battles wisely" came from a memory in the game. It popped up during the beginning of the game, where the player was advised that putting off a battle simply means that one would have to go back and fight later; there was no avoiding certain battles.  However, with the inclusion of the clock, I decided to go with this current title. This phrase is a part of the instructions for one of the bonus…things, the one where you have to run inside this snail shell thing. There are 3 types of tasks. One is a quiz, the second is "Kill or be killed", the third is "Can you survive the passage of time?". The first is self-explanatory. The second is to kill all of the enemies. The last one is to just survive, so they will have enemies like the Executioner running after Alice. Anyway, since I had the clock, I decided to have it time-related, hence the final title.

I guess the first problem I foresaw but did not bother to avoid was the direction of the lighting. Where was it coming from? Honestly, to this day, I have no idea. Mostly I just assumed that it was generally coming from the top…but after a while I gave up and I just followed the lighting from the illustrations.

The next problem I had was with positioning. I know the Hobby Horse is a whole lot bigger than poker cards and the Vorpal Blade, but I was so reluctant to decrease the size of the other objects, as I had put a lot of effort into vectoring the patterns, especially on the Vorpal Blade. So, I decided, this is Alice in Wonderland, size doesn't really matter because it can change anytime. Remember, "eat me", "drink me"? And so I left the disproportion as it was. Yeah!

Something else that I did differently for this wall was to "play by ear". I usually have 3 dark shades and 2 light shades, but in this case, especially so for the Hobby Horse, I just added shade layers as and when necessary. Of course, I tried my best to avoid redundancy, and I think I managed to achieve that. I also found that the use of colour burn was exceptionally useful for adding shadows with a tinge of colour. Finally, as per my usual style, I like to over-emphasize the dark shades. To me, light shades have a high risk of turning to white, and a common problem of Photoshop is that it cannot achieve a shade of white that is "whiter than white", if you know what I mean…something like, it can do white, but not a BRILLIANT white. I tend to use vivid light for the orange glow of the Hobby Horse, and I think it came out pretty well, nice and creepy, but not as fiery as I would like.

The clock was where I experimented with texturing. I used a whole bunch of brushes to paint the textures. Some were default brushes, and I believe I also used the usual painting brushes by `adonihs. I also (randomly) selected a bunch of copper tones to add a tinge of metal, and some green to give a "moss-like" appearance. However, the lighting for the clock was really odd. In the centre of the clock, the lighting would be exceptionally bright, but on the numbers, it was just right. Now I didn't have any vector/layer masks, mind you. I do know how to debug in Photoshop D: anyway, the point was that the lighting effects were odd. In any case, I think my texturing was pretty good; the lighting, not so, but still decent.

I vectored the poker cards from Google images that I found. They weren't difficult; just tedious. The Queen of Hearts card from the game actually looks really different from the normal poker cards, but when I realized it, I had already finished the card. So obviously, lazy me decided to just leave it as it was.

During the post-processing, I also found out the usefulness of having 2 extra copies of the final object, one on colour dodge and the other on colour burn. Colour dodge helps to give a nice sheen to the light shades, while colour burn adds a rich shadow to the dark shades.

The last thing I did was the blood. It is more difficult that it looks! I used a lot of splatter brushes, from ~hawksmont, *FlorianHesse and the usual painting brushes by `adonihs. Then I slowly picked out a few to transform and place them around. The floor was done using a pattern I made. It's really easy! Just create a canvas of size 1024x1024, divide the area into 4 equal parts, and colour 2 opposite diagonals black. Then create the pattern! Hurray to automation!

Finally…when I saved the .png file, I realized that the thumbnail looks ugly. Now, a professional would then take certain measures to correct this. Me, I looked at it, decided "oh never mind", and left it.

Some closing thoughts on AMR: lovely, gorgeous visuals. The artwork deserves every bit of praise that folks are giving it. The slicing-dicing movement of the Vorpal, the whinny of the Hobby Horse, Alice's dresses…I especially love her Siren outfit, it makes her look so surreal. There was so much effort put into the environment, and the way that the original Alice in Wonderland characters were woven into the tale was superb. I especially like the transitions from London to Wonderland. However, gameplay does get repetitive, and they shouldn't have cut out all those boss battles. Ah well, nothing's perfect, after all. From what I read from the artbook, they were rushing to complete this on time, hence the "paper-ish" cutscenes, as opposed to full CGI cutscenes.

Wallpaper statistics:
Hobby Horse: 220
Vorpal Blade: 29
Clock: 79
Cards: 12
Blood: 9
Post processing: 24

There are surprisingly few layers for the Clock, despite the fact that I was adding additional groups for texturing. I have future AMR wallpapers in the pipeline, but for now, next wallpaper: Ookami. I promise. Give me another 6 months; I'll complete it. I'll probably ask for an extension of the deadline. Hmmm…