This was a collaboration with NoWaifuN0Laifu based on his design, where he wrote a character quest for ES Hozuki and imagined her as a crystal element hammer user - “I made ES Hozuki’s quest (feel free to use WFS)”. On a whim, I offered to draw his design for him.

You can see 2 other images on either link, a full-body view and the prototype designs:

• pixelfed: https://pxlfd.plus/i/web/post/587951629771305271
• pixiv: https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/104285179

You may have already seen this, but I thought I’d share it here on kbin since I deleted my posts on reddit.

This was kind of tricky for me because I had to improvise a lot on the design. I had a few prompts, like “beautiful black and purple kimono”, but they say a picture is worth a thousand words, and that was five words. So I had to research what kimonos are like, and learn about cultural things like don’t draw the right side over the left, because you only do that for dead people, etc. I watched a video where someone showed how they put on a kimono. They’re really complicated to wear, but interesting nonetheless.

Looking at it now, there were some things I wish I fixed, but by then I wanted to be done!

One thing I wanted to mention is that in this drawing, I tried out the bloom effect where you imitate the way light bleeds when you use a physical camera. It tends to make things look softer and more full of light. You’ve probably seen it in anime here and there, or video games. I didn’t know how it was done and always wanted to imitate that look, so it was intriguing to try. I couldn’t do it too much in this piece though, because I already abused applied glow dodge to a lot of the drawing and it would have made everything look too washed out. If you’re interested in how to do it with Clip Studio Paint, You can see this tutorial video by Manu Mercurial (timestamped at 11m14s).