Howl´s Moving Castle At Staubbach Falls Switzerland

I did paint the whole Landscape and the Castle!

But, the landscape is heavily based on a painting from Albert Bierstadt - check out his amazing works: www.albertbierstadt.org/
The work is in Public Domain, according to: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bierstadt_Albert_Staubbach_Falls_Near_Lauterbrunnen_Switzerland.jpg

Actually the jpegs of this specific work for reference, were in such a bad quality that I had to paint the whole image from scratch - a nice test for me and I created some useful brushes along the way. Since I had no usable hi-res source, I hope you can accept the little flaws in it, most stuff is painted from imagination and my personal interpretation of huge jpeg-artifacts ;)

Good part of having to paint the whole thing was that I was able to push it more into a Miyazaki kind of mood and coloring that matches the concept that I originally had in mind.

The intention behind this is to learn from the old masters, Mastercopies are good, but actually there´s no better way of studying them than to get your hands dirty and spend 10 hours in the image and paint something that is not there. This time it took me around 20 hours.

Get the wallpaper sized version here (2560 x 1620px): http://fav.me/d7hib6v