Baltar and Six

(Full View neccessary)

( EDIT: I've changed it to the original file, so you can see the whole thing and I made it a tiny bit smaller. Can view fullsize by downloading. It's about time I used this deviant art crop thing. I spent a really long time on this so I'm just trying to make sure the size or cropping isn't annoying people. )

So... yeah... finally this is done.

This piece, as like 99% of my gallery, was a learning exercise, and after many different styles, I tried to work on a technique to best give a photo-realistic result. I think I achieved that... somewhat.
I found beards/hair difficult, but got to it after a few attempts.

Textures?
The texture for the jacket was something I whipped up with a few brush strokes and a lot of radial blur just to give it a directional look.
And six's sparkly-singlet thing was easily achieved, by playing with a few brush strokes, photoshop noise and levels to make a very simplistic but successful texture.

The background was also only 20 minutes or so. Not as detailed in it's true form, but guassian blurred out of focus, killing two birds.

The original source file is 6000 pixels wide. I'm finding it easier to make things look detailed when starting off large and cropping later.
The only real problem I encountered was chosing a cropping/resolution that would work well. How wide is too wide? How much of the original image should I show, how tall is too tall? Etc etc etc.
I ended up cutting off 1/4 of the image's width on the sides so that the figures are only just in frame and well, I'm still not sure if the image is too big/small. I hope this is okay.

I have it available in any resolution you can possibly imagine, including widescreen resolutions, if anybody wants a wallpaper copy. I'm using it as mine currently. 1680x1050.

Anyway.
I'm glad this is finally over.

Comments welcome and appreciated

Cheers, sorry for the huge description.
-Dan