Having put the eyes in the sky, I was playing with various versions of the statue's face against a sky background. A posterized version must have reminded me of a character from one Miyazaki's animated films, since when I was later trying to duplicate a Japanese wood block print of Mt. Fuji, I got the idea of floating the face above the mountain. The mountain is a masked gradient, with snow filled crevasses created with the polygon lasso. The trees are a brush I created from a custom object.