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Oh wow, oh wow...I started this on April 28th, 2009 and finished yesterday, October 2nd 2009. The bg has 781 images in it - 11 sets of 71. 11 because that's what fit, 71 because that's how many different animes are in here. All 71 I’ve watched, though I admit not all I have completed. The list is as follows:

Inuyasha
Gakuen Alice
Fruits Basket
Wolf's Rain
Chrno's Crusade
Bleach
Full Metal Alchemist
Full Metal Panic
Rave Master
Gundam SEED
Gundam SEED Destiny
D.N. Angel
Get Backers
Ouran High School Host Club
Trigun
Pretear
Fate/Stay Night
Full Moon wo Sagishite
Pokemon
Saiyuki
Tokyo Mew Mew
Naruto
Naruto Shippuuden
Death Note
Code Geass
Code Geass R2
Eureka Seven
Soul Link
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzimiya
Vampire Knight
Vampire Knight Guilty
Magic Knight Rayearth
Black Cat
Soul Eater
Darker Than Black
Saiunkoku Monogatari
Innocent Venus
Izumo: Takeki Tsurugi no Senki
Scrapped Princess
Shugo Chara!
Neo Angelique ~Abyss~
Weiss Kreuz
Weiss Kreuz Gluhen
Special A
Natsume Yūjinchō
Zoku Natsume Yūjinchō
Chaos; Head
D.Gray-man
Tytania
Clannad
Clannad ~After Story~
.hack//sign
Busou Renkin
Chobits
Kuroshitsuji
Zombie Loan
Kaze no Stigma
Spice and Wolf
FMA: Brotherhood
Guin Saga
Sengoku Basara
Senjou no Valkyria: Gallian Chronicles
Shangri-La
Pandora Hearts
07-Ghost
Phantom ~ Requiem for the Phantom
Tears to Tiara
Hanasakeru Seishounen
Asura Cryin'
Tayutama ~ Kiss on my Deity
Chrome Shelled Regios

Like with my previous collages, no two images of the same anime touch, but there are a few times that it gets close. Every single anime has 11 images in the bg – I know because I did the background in sets. At first, I used my fingers to find where the previous pics had been for a certain anime, but that got tiring and was hard to do. Not only that, but it was time consuming. About 4 sets in (284 images) I decided to make guide layers – layers over all the pics that showed where the pics from each anime were. With the 71 guide layers, the background layer, the blend layer and the 781 image layers, I had 854 layers in PhotoShop. A tip? It’s not recommended to have that many! PS actually behaved rather well, considering. It would minipause when I show/hid the guide layers, when I would put a pic in and when I would zoom out. Though for the last set, it was minipausing when I scrolled. >.< But, I prevailed!

Oh, and let’s not forget that stretch of time where I had a bad cord! It would provide power but not charge the battery. So, whenever the cord fell out, the comp would shut off instantaneously. The cord my comp has isn’t very tight and secure, so it happened a lot…after losing several images a few times, I became a save whore. I would save after every image placement to make sure nothing major was ever lost. Even after I used a new cord, I still saved frequently. Not as much because by then saving took awhile, but enough that I knew nothing too bad would be lost: after ~10-15 pics.

Again, this took a long, long time to make. Partly because at some points I stopped and didn’t pick it up for a few weeks, partly because of what it involved. I went from not using any shortcuts to using all the ones I could; it used to take me about a week and a half to do a set of 71 and I finished out with it only taking 2-3 days. I ellipsed all the images in the background, resized them and placed them in. I started out doing the ellipses as I went but ended up for the later sets doing the ellipses all at once and doing a generic resize afterwards. It meant that instead of seeing a pic I wanted to use and doing its ellipse and doing a resize, I would find a pic and it would already be ellipsed and slightly downsized. I still would have to do some resizing so it fit exactly in the spot I wanted it to, but it was much better than before. I also went from taking 5-7 minutes on each ellipse to taking one to one and a half minutes. I found shortcuts that helped, and I also revised my strategy…For the first 8 or so sets, I would erase the corners of the pic – the part the ellipse didn’t cover – then magic erase it out, then switch back to the normal eraser and erase around the ellipse. Turns out there is a shortcut to making that background layer most images have into a layer you can edit directly without the run around. Made things much easier: ctrl+p the layer, then erase the edges. Oh, I wish I had discovered that earlier!

Anyway, here it is finally. It’s been a long road for me, that’s for sure! I think I can honestly say “Never again” now. Yes, I will probably make more collages in the future. No, they won’t be this size and probably will only be specific tributes. My next one I’ve already decided is going to be a Naruto one – I find it vexing that while it is my favorite animanga, I haven’t made a tribute for it. Death Note, which I now don’t really like, has its own tribute, so Naruto must have one too. Whether it will be a full tribute to the animanga or a tribute to the Uchiha brothers or even just a tribute to Uchiha Itachi, I do not know. However, do expect to see one eventually…once I get over this bg, of course, and can stand to do more ellipses!