Japanese crossword «Suspense»

i don't really know what to do with your comment, midwestboyintexas.
"the same result" pertaining as to what?
surely not the motif as this would be true at (nearly) any size.
and by defintion you're not talking about the resolution.
so if i'm guessing what you mean with "the same result" is something along the lines of "sufficently similar to illicit the same reactions in the beholder"?
next thing that isn't clear is the "much smaller size". since you mentionend it, if i use scrolling as a reference i would have to divide the size of the image to around a fifth of its size to completely fit the image and the key-bars onto my screen. that to me would certainly count as "much smaller". but i put it to you, that if you show the original image and the reduced version to 100 people and ask them, which one they like better, you will not get a majority of answers in the vain of "what do you mean better? there's no difference".
On a more subjective note: i started out with a lot(!) more details in my first drafts

... (that in your view might have warranted the larger format?) but had to reduce a lot of that because of the sites restrictions (no more than 50 alternations between colorblocks per line/collumn). if you take a look at the key-bars you can see that i'm right at the edge of that in lines as well as in collumns. and you may recognize, that these edge-cases are clustered around the face in particular. that is no coincidence. in order to stay within the boundaries, i reduced details wherever else i could in order to keep as much fidelity as possible in the facial expression since that was my main intended focus here. so to me personally a "much smaller size" would not have yielded the "same result" at all. i took great pains to fight for every single pixel to keep her facial expression as detailed as possible (and it is a huge effort that takes up hours since the site only tells you, that you are over the limits but not in which line/collum and you have to count them each individually).

at the end it is a tradeoff between tediousness and fidelity and i for my part lean strongly towards the latter. but i guess, that comes down to personal preference. but maybe i completely misunderstood what you meant? let me know if that's the case.
otherwise i'm happy you at least enjoyed the challenge.
cheers, mate.

(and in case you're not doing so already i would strongly encourage you to use the beta-version of the site and it's features which eliminate a whole lot of the scrolling issues on larger puzzles)