A nice idea -- a bit of softing on the edges of the wings and some work on the masking betwwen the wing and shoe on the left would improve this IMHO

Good job!
Just one suggestion: Step 10 looks better without the white streak across the balloon. GL author!

Thanks CMYK! I'll have some more work on it, I wanted some cloud stripes in front of the balloon to give the scene some more deepness, I guess it needs some more work to make it clear but subtile.

Very creative literal take on the theme (which would be emphasized if the title were "World Balloon". I like the calm, restful mood evoked by the muted color palette.

While greater depth is a good objective as a general rule, I like the uncluttered simplicity of Step 10 which I think already shows a lot of depth starting with the front-plane clouds in the lower right corner and then going diagonally back to the balloon floating over the cloud "plain" in front of the cloud "mountains" in front of Saturn in the far distance.

It's the best description I could ever hear about this scene. Thank you so much! I'll take off the front layer of clouds.

Really nice take on this theme. Like how you distorted the earth image to match the shape of the actual balloon. I'd like this even more I think if Saturn wasn't monochrome. This works too...though!

EDIT: Author your explanation makes perfect sense. Thanks for sharing. I like the way it is now too. Upon looking again...I think the way it is now lends more of an attraction...because it ISN'T typical. Nice job!

Thanks for your comment pixelkid, most of what we do as artists is in certain way a recreation of visual fantasies that are part of our self made inner world. This goes for the monochromatic vision of saturn: I've always been seduced by the idea of how would it look to have a big exotic planet near earth, and the thing is that actually in daylight it would probably look very similar to what I did in my composition, due to the color filtering of our blue atmosphere.

Yes, this is more about visual poetry than about optical realism... Thanks again!

Very pretty scene

Thxs!!!

nice one..good luck

Thanks everyone for your votes!!!

Congrats for 2nd

Congrats!

Sara Barth and Lies Meirlaen have both been notified of their image being used, by note thru Stock.xchng.

I like the overall colours of this image, it suits the elements in the image so well. Good work!

I like it overall however I think it could have been straightened up to make it look level.

I thought of straightening the right entry post, but decided it added to the state of decay. Therefore, I left it as it is, to be fitting of the theme.

This is nice entry author and with few tweaks this can be even better...Sky image and the overall mood don't go with each other...U have day light for the house and people but rainy dark sky...U have to made image darker or to find some other sky for this image...I think that some other sky would be better in this case...Also IMHO spiders are to big..For better blending u can use some color layers in different blend modes..There is slight difference in resolution of provided source image and images that u used so some color layers would fix that difference...sorry for this nit picks...

Erathion, all the changes you requested have been made, with the addition of a nicer weathervane and lightening.

Cool concept. The fairly uniform lighting makes it all rather blah, however. A lot more shadows would make it a lot more dramatic. Some green (for example) interior lights might convey both "open for business" and "eccentric."

it looks loke a painting, very nice good luck!

It's sort of scary, really like it!

very fun author, great job!

I need to learn more about the method used to form the cloud.

very cool, kind of steampunky - especially like the other flying fishie ship.

Very nice! Agree about fishie ship!

Nice dreamy and imaginative image. Hopefully it isn't too late to edit your image. There's a halo of white around the top main sail. See if you can edit that...that's the only thing I see fitting to be changed. Nice job, author!!

Amazing!! Fav!

very interesting scene...best of luck author

thank you all for the comments and pixelkid sorry I didn't had the time to correct that white halo. I'm surprised that I hadn't seen it .. thanks for the observation