I was actually pretty excited when I saw that the Minitokyo Knockout Round 3 theme was Art Nouveau, since I’ve never tried the style before. And with the non-human subject requirement I immediately thought “YEAH MOKONA!!!” Gotta give loves to my internet alter-ego 
The scan that I ended up using immediately struck a chord, not only because it puts Mokona up front and center, but also because of the heavy Japanese style which feeds directly into the Art Nouveau theme.
Walling Art Nouveau was definitely a lot more challenging than I thought. Mainly because the structure is fairly rigid, once I got the initial concept down I had to run with it – there’s not much room for tweaking (AKA getting lazy and cutting stuff out). Also, the framing involved makes cropping all the different resolutions a nightmare. Luckily I had read a couple of Tama’s excellent blog posts on designing for different resolutions, so I had a rough plan in mind for organizing the layers and readying for the cropping of different wall resolutions. As is, I still didn’t do a thorough enough job in breaking out the different framing elements, which made cropping the 1600 and 1280 resolutions a lot more painful than it should’ve been.
Looking over my recent walls, I feel like my walling style has changed. It’s mainly the colors – I use a brighter palette nowadays than before I went on my six-month volunteering trip. Which is mostly a good thing because I’ve always thought that I’m color-challenged. However, this Mokona wall is actually a bit too busy for my usual tastes. Several of the MTK judges mentioned “simple” in their comments for this wall, which I guess it is in comparison to some of the other entries… but the swirly background makes my head spin if I look at it for too long. There’s constant tension going on between my need to make a good “competition” wall AND a good “simple” wall.
Working my new style in with my usual desktop preferences might take a bit of tweaking. But despite my complaining, I do like where the new walls are taking me – and I hope I can take advantage of my current part-time work schedule to keep experimenting with different walling styles, at least in the near future 
Related posts:
I have completely failed using Tama’s method. I went and figured out the correct pixel dimensions to try what Tama did, but I didn’t work with my guidelines on and still completely messed up. 8D
Also, your things have had more colour lately. I feel like I should be teasing about the swirls making your head spin. (x
Color is harder than black-and-white/monochrome
. I loved that wall – mokona looks like one of those Indian buddhas coming out of a lotus petal XD.