This might well be one of my last images for a while. At least as far as terraspace goes. Essentially, it's both a present and a commission for my girlfriend, commission because I made it until she was happy (as such, I won't change a single thing), despite the initial ideas being my own. In that vein, I had the ultimate motivation to do my best.
There was a lot of "back to basics" work here. Designing the terrain was the hardest part, and getting anything remotely looking like a heart-shaped ox-bow lake is a challenge when you want it to have any natural feel to it. There were 10 individual renders stitched together in total, I may submit them all to my scraps at some point. I wanted to push the depth factor as much as possible too, so there's a fair bit of foreground element. There's an insane number of concepts in this that may mean nothing to some, but something to others... but for me it's just one of my best. The hands in the image (you can't see one because the other is on top of it) are mine and hers. Just so it means something a bit more, so it's really ours.
Thanks to various stock websites including imageafter and morguefile for reference stocks, came in handy especially for getting the scenarics right, and doing the balloons too of course.
Thanks to Kayleigh for being her look, alyn being soppy! no photos kthx
Please take note of the critique discouraged - this is a sensitive piece to me and both myself and kayleigh are entirely happy with it. It's nice and all if you spot an area which you may think needs improving, but that isn't what we want. We're happy.