Links to religion

I've been doing a series of 'spiritual/religious' illustrations for Dreamstime.  They have a month long contest that just ended...and I wasn't able to finish this one in time.  So instead of just posting it to Dreamstime (a contest entry means you have to have that image be exclusive with them), I'm going to upload it to all the stock sites I'm on.

This illustration has been in the works for the last two weeks.  I originally did a drawing of a little girl praying and got a lot of feedback about how kids are usually shown kneeling in front of their bed before bedtime.  So this illustration reflects that feedback.  I scanned in a pen drawing and cleaned it up and colored it in Adobe Illustrator.  I've only been able to upload it to one site so far (Shutterstock) because they take Illustrator 10 files and all the other sites only accept Illustrator 8.

I'm using Adobe Illustrator CS3, but because of the nature and slow evolution of the stock image market, they only accept illustrator 8 files - so I always have to back save it.  Shutterstock has taken a small step forward and (only in the last month or so) started accepting Illustrator 10 files.  That means that for all the sites you cannot use the new filters or effects (such as transparencies) or when it's reopened the file is corrupt or, at least, ruined.

Take, for example, the image above.  It's fine if saved as an Illustrator 10 file.  But if you save it as an Illustrator 8 file - all the blends I did to get the highlights on the kid turn from 2 circles (to get the effect) to 25 or so circles.  It ends up looking like a sloppy color job and raises the file's size.  And then the transparency to get the light effect rasterizes (which is death for vector files) as does the lens flares that went into making the light in the sky.

So - I spent the last two hours last night changing all the blend effects on the boy to gradients and changing the transparencies to a series of different shapes to fake the effect.  And I'm stuck on the light...I might have to completely redo that part.  But we'll see.  Stupid Illustrator 8.