Commentary
Originally, this was just a simple practice session where i began by vaguely tracing over a picture of an irl bust, and then adapting it to my style. I was planning to do Ena next but then i started cooking outta nowhere. I was starting to add in the colors, clean up the sketch into a serviceable lineart and then i barely remembered this one fanart of Mizuki with her younger self having her signature ponytail as an abstract solid color. None of us were even thinking or planned any of this. I just pulled a vague memory of a post i've seen before out of the depths and we knew we had to do something cool like that.
If you noticed that the piece looks different here compared to the original post on Twitter, that's because i did a bunch of touch-ups on an upsized version of the original canvas. The main changes were the "aura" that Mizuki had compressed into an outline, her ribbon getting the missing hearts back, and her ponytail being a bit sharper and having a subtle gradient now.
As of writing this post, I had this piece printed and about to be framed on one of my many walls. I had a lil rude awakening when i got two defects that ended up very dark and saturated. As it turns out, my laptop's monitor is just NOT good enough for making color-centric pieces such as this one. Now i am dreading that some of my pieces look blown out in some of yall's screens, but i won't be doing anything substantial to rectify that because i'm too lazy for that.
Wanna see how scuffed my process is?