Venusaur

This piece, by FAR, takes the "favorite sprite signature of all time" award. This glorious piece of work contains roughly 30 layers, but captures perfectly a Venusaur gathering energy for a powerful Solarbeam.
Up until the very end of creating it I had him just sitting on a mound of solid green, which made it look very plain. I thought some grass was in order, he is after all a grass type pokemon. So I went back through all my layers and made necessary corrections so that grass would show up easily without having to do tons of recoloring or gradient mapping. The grass was unexpectingly, the most difficult part of the tag, probably due to the fact it was added in the end. The toughest part of the grass addition was trying to match it with the lighting and making it fade out seamlessly so that it won't distract the viewer.
I went out of my comfort zone a few times during the course of this creation, mostly because I was using photomanipulation skills in a sprite signature, which is very uncommon. Also, when it came to placing the C4Ds around Venusaur's flower, I was at a loss when I started with it, and had to experiment 3 or 4 times before I got the desired effect. It just goes to show it pays to have patience and experiment.

--Fourbrezio