Air of an Imperfect Escape

The DeviantArt user DragoTheDragon 24 asked me to draw this, and I did so because I liked the idea of the drawing enough to want to make it. Since the feature called “Pixiv Request” is a means of commissioning art, and therefore not really what I’m looking for in terms of drawing other people’s ideas, I don’t expect to use it anytime soon.

In this alternate take on the fairy tale “Rapunzel”, the titular maiden and the prince attempt to leave the tower she’s trapped in together by rappelling down it using her hair as a rope. However, the sorceress who imprisoned her catches them in the act, and summons a gale to stop them. I haven’t thought about how this version of the story ends, so feel free to devise an ending yourself.

At first, I planned to make this image a side view to the point of performing initial composition for that version of the image. However, that version of the image would either fail to make the tower look as tall as the legend requires, or be so large as to be impossible to draw; these issues kept that version of the drawing from reaching the sketch phase. To fix them, I re-compsitied the image to depict the same event from above instead, and even then the top of the tower is offscreen.

I drew the background on a separate physical layer to make adding a blur effect easier. Creating the effect was simply a matter of using GIMP’s focus blur filter, putting the unblurred center of the filter on the top of the tower to make it seem closer. The ground layer was kept low-detail because I planned to blur it from the start, and the low detail helps it seem far away.