Sakura's Magic Circle (Vector Art)

[Takeru]

This is a vector art of the magic circle used by Sakura while she is casting magic. It was done in Photoshop CS2 and vectored almost entirely from scratch. It took me four hours; it is my first vector ever.

Many of you will notice that this has indeed been done before by SakuraCorazonn, who first adapted Sakura's magic circle into an excellent vector image in in 2005 and titled it Sakura Standard. The magic circle you are looking at now is, essentially, an updated version of Sakura Standard. When SakuraCorazonn first uploaded Sakura Standard, she had mentioned that due to the low quality of her source material, her image had numerous imperfections, including the proportions of the circles and some of the line distancing. Most, if not all, of these issues have been addressed in this version; this vector was done from the ground up, and numerous measurements were made in order to ensure that every circle and line was drawn to as near perfection as possible.

There are two major differences between this and Sakura's actual magic circle from the show. First of all, the magic symbols surrounding the inner circle have been replaced by Greek characters. Second of all, the stars don't overlap the first surrounding ring. The thing about the stars shouldn't be a big deal, but the Greek symbols is a much more noticeable change.

This adaptation stands at 2500 x 2500 (not including the title bar at the bottom of the image), and all vectored lines are 5 pixels thick. It has been compressed into a .JPG image that is 1.36 MB in size. I'm also distributing this file in .PSD format for those who would like the luxury of layers and transparency; all you need to do is contact me at one of my several E-mail addresses and IM clients.

Feel free to use this image in your wallpapers as you so desire, as long as credit is given. Oh, and I'd love to see how this gets implemented into other people's work as well, so if anyone does decide to use this, please let me know, I'd love to see what you do with it.

Credits go to SakuraCorazonn for creating the excellent original.

Hope you guys enjoy!


UPDATE: Version 2.1 - July 31, 2007

Oops! Forgot to add the lines that go on the bottom star. I'm an idiot, yes, I know.


UPDATE: Version 2.3 - August 02, 2007

I made a couple of minor changes to a few key details within the circle that I stupidly missed the first and second time around.

First, I added an extra segment to the inner ring surrounding the stars. And second, I added the lines that's supposed to go between the crisscrossing squares. Finally, and this doesn't concern the actual image itself, I took the version name out of the title, and I placed it in the bottom left corner of the image, next to the date of the latest update.

[D.J.P]

nice. Thanks for sharing

Question but: why the changes you made?

[Takeru]

Which ones?

[D.J.P]

These ones:

There are two major differences between this and Sakura's actual magic circle from the show. First of all, the magic symbols surrounding the inner circle have been replaced by Greek characters. Second of all, the stars don't overlap the first surrounding ring.

[Takeru]

Because the stars are disproportionate on the left and right sides (I used a stock image for the star). Also, the magic characters in my source material weren't detailed enough for me to make renditions of, so I just used basic Greek characters.

I plan to fix these eventually.

[monkey]

Very Nice.
Let us know when you get the next update.
Be sure to put it in the proper Vector format too (a .png) so we have no pixelated problems :3
After it's done we should get a Vector artist to go over it in Illustrator, maybe even have it saved with the layers of the circle put separately so we could use it for animation purposes too.

[Takeru]

I could certainly do that. I'm just too lazy to at the moment.

[monkey]

aw that's a shame, It's still the best I've seen tho ^_^b

[Takeru]

Well, okay, it's easy to convert to .PNG, but the real issue here is that I didn't do it in Illustrator, I did it in Photoshop. Also, since I did each layer separately, if I made the innards of the circle elements transparent, you'd be able to see the elements of the circle below it. I can make the layers separate, but you'd be able to see through the moon and the sun and stuff. I can't make it so the foreground elements (such as the sun, the moon, and the big star in the center) occlude the background elements (like the crisscrossing squares or the circle itself) while still showing the background.