IF: Rescue

I did this illustration for the Dreamstime contest about spirituality.  I took my time with this one and completely finished it in Adobe Illustrator.  For stock illustration sites (like Dreamstime) you have to save them as Illustrator 8 files, so a lot of the newer advances in filters and things aren't available (like if you tried to use a transparency it'll become a bitmap which is horrible for a vector image).

At least version 8 of illustrator lets you use blends because thats what I used predominantly to get the soft light effect on the girl.

Now, before I did this one, I already finished 4 other illustrations for this month's Dreamstime contest.  The first two were denied as being too generic and simple (I disagreed, but it's not up to me).  Those two were silhouette illustrations of the three wise men following a star:

Okay - now it is simple, but the sky was a lot more complex, as was the star...and I thought the overall effect was quite nice (and good color)...I tried challenging the ruling and was told that I needed to make it more complex...

It's annoying when it's my own illustrations that they turn down (the last contest had about 80 images and over 500 turned down...), but at least it means that the contest will usually consist of the best images the Dreamstime community is producing.

Anyhow I spent almost a week on the little girl praying image to help rescue my chances of winning one of these contests.  It takes about a week to get approved (it's agonizing watching the image countdown from 160 hours...and it's approximate, so one day it could say 140 hours left and the next it'll be 145).