Princess Mononoke

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It was really hard doing the background for this in photoshop.

I drew, inked, and colored traditionally the figure of Princess Mononoke on white paper. Then, I scanned it in, messed with the pixelization, and deleted the white with the "magic eraser."

Then I made the background a layer, created a new layer and put it behind that first layer, and paint bucketed the back layer black.

Unfortunately, since I had done everything on white paper, the pixels next to ms. Princess were still an off white that stood out quite well on the black background.

I had to fix this on the uber-zoomed-in-level, and that alone took nearly a half hour. By then I was really tired of this picture and didn't want to finish the background.

but I did... as you can see.

Does anyone know a better way to do this?

All characters owned by Studio Ghibli, and Hayoa Miyazaki