This image is primarily a tribute to my favorite anime movie, Angel's 
Egg. Unfortunately, this movie is terribly obscure, I've only seen one 
copy of the movie in all of my years as an anime fan, and I own that 
copy. :-) It is just about the only film I've ever seen that is truly a 
work of art in every respect. Unfortunately, it will never appear in 
this country because it lacks the giant robots and large breasted women 
that are the staple of 'anime' in this country. Siiighhh If enough 
people pester me, I might put some pics from the movie on my web site, I 
own the book "The Art of Angel's Egg." The director later produced 
"Ghost In The Shell," and that film's climatic sequence in the museum 
borrows very heavily from his earlier creation. The futuristic tank and 
android "self portrait" are both a nod towards his later film work. 

The background for this shot was actually rendered in Lightwave, then 
worked on in Photoshop. I decided to try an experiment, borrowing from 
traditional painting. What I did was create the background set in 
lightwave, set up the basic lighting, and rendered the objects out 
without any textures, using the default light grey surface value. This 
background rendering was then used as an underpainting, on top of which 
I worked all of the additional details I wanted. In "Angel's Egg," the 
backgrounds are luscious pen and watercolor paintings, and I decided to 
try to recreate it with Lightwave to the best of my ability.

Anyway, I loaded the background into photoshop, and painted a second 
value layer, which helped establish the painterly feel to the landscape. 
Then I added the pen drawing, and colored it all in with a light wash 
(hooray for Wacom tablets!). After I was finished with all of that work, 
I reloaded the lightwave scene, positioned the battle tank, whose 
surfaces are using the default super cell shader, with the thinnest cell 
line settings. I comped the tank onto the prepared background in 
photoshop, and then rendered the android, using the default super cell 
shader settings, with automatic cell line thickness, finally placing him 
on top of it all.