Kingdom Hearts: Adding a shadow

I revisited the addition of the shadow as I felt it would work well with the design, as not only would it give the composition depth but give a new layout to the design so that it would work on a t-shirt. I didn't continue the shadow for the background crown that I added in the previous layout designs I initially created, as I felt that the addition of the crown made the design too complicated. Even though I wanted to create a silhouette that was slightly more detailed compared to the Kiki's Delivery Service design, the crown took the detail further, and would most likely need to make the rest of the composition more detailed for the crown to work. I developed the characters shadow further by adding the eyes to the shadow as it related to the Heartless version of Sora in the Kingdom Hearts series. It also worked with the main theme of the Kingdom Hearts games through the main enemies being Heartless in which the main protagonist, Sora, defeats to save worlds.

I wanted the shadow to be on the floor of the image rather than behind the character as it would be hard to perceive the shadow's eyes from behind the character; also gave depth to the image. To create the shadow, I copied the main layer of the character and used the magic wand to select the background, in which I then inverted the selection to be able to obtain the figure; I then used the paint bucket tool to fill the selection. Using the transform options, I was able to manipulate the shadow by using Distort and Skew, to create the illusion that it was cast onto the floor. I preferred the second version as the shadow worked more successfully than the previous as it didn't feel squashed it was elongated and worked with the lighting. The first design didn't work with the lighting as for the shadow to be cast, the light needed to be emitted from behind the character, in which the character needed to have some form of dark shades on the design to show this depiction to the viewer. The shadow also needed to be flipped horizontally for the shadow to correspond with the character.  

Version 1

Version 2