My artistic journey (through the years)

Here's my entry for the "artistic journey" contest - I almost can't believe I'm that early this time! (Usually I start very late and work through the nights until short before the deadline).

I had the idea of showing all of the different techniques that I've been using through the years in one image and showing me (or my hand) painting/drawing (which I already did in a painting more than six years ago). I also thought, a hot air balloon would be a nice symbol for a journey.
I used parts of old drawings and paintings and a photograph and did a lot of additional digital drawing and painting.

On the left you see two enhanced parts of older drawings that I put together in Photoshop (the eye is about 18 years old, I only changed the landscape whithin the iris). I also drew a lot of additional things into it digitally (on a Wacom tablet), as the drawing hand, the clouds, the crystal balls or drops and many more stars (and I enhanced the branches on the upper right of the left side). Btw. in the eye you can see a levitating ship, the reference for this is the ship on the front cover of the album "Fragile" by YES in 1971, originally painted by Roger Dean. I did this because my love for art started when looking at the fantasy books and LP covers of my dad and "Fragile" from YES was among them (I always loved Roger Deans work and since 8 years I also love the music of YES).
The right side is based on an acrylic painting from 2008 (yes, even the hand and the fly were painted traditionally) over which I painted many other things digitally (as the tree and the spheres) and took the clouds in the sky from a photo taken by me.
You can see the original which I used as the basic background here: painted light).
I always loved to do surreal paintings, Dalí and other surrealists are an important part of my inspiration.

So, in this image I used traditional drawing (ink) and painting (acrylics on canvas) as well as digital drawing and painting and even photo manipulating, and I showed my favourite styles of the different stages of my journey.

Edit:
I've changed a few minor things (as the light on the tree and mountains, some of the leaves and as it is an autumn scene, I've added falling leaves to the image).
I think, now it's really finished!