Shpritc

Continuing from my New Year Keiki piece, I once again took a crack at simplifying shapes with this piece by focusing a lot on silhouettes. I really, really, really love how the shapes of this piece turned out. I didn't do any proper rendering with this and there are a few details I omitted from Zanmu's design for the sake of clarity (and also, my sanity), but overall I love how this turned out. I had so much fun with using her shirt's sleeves to create a blocky silhouette, and I am so happy with how I did her hair. This is around the time where I realized that I don't need to render every single strand of hair, and I am so happy I realized that because it has helped me in my art process so much. I also really like the colour palette for this, it was kinda inspired by the Zorn colour palette for this, and I wanted to use solid black for some of the shading since I liked the contrast it provided. I also experimented with giving her tanner skin and once again it helped in unifying the colour palette a lot. While I do wish I could make Zanmu look a little older with her face, I do like how simplified I made it. I also gave her a white undershirt, mainly from a "how does this outfit make sense" perspective because I can be a bit of a stickler for that sometimes lol.

Now to just talk about Zanmu a little more because she has officially supplanted Keiki as my favourite Touhou character and I love thinking about her. So first of all, every time I come back to Touhou 19's story and dialogue and I read any scenario with Zanmu in it, I just appreciate her more and more.

Like, take this piece of dialogue from if Zanmu wins in Saki's scenario.

This has the same vibes as a villain in a shounen anime saying to the protagonist, "get up" and then taunting them while they're injured from their fight on the ground. Zanmu is what would happen if you shoved a shounen villain into Touhou project, she goes into monologue's about how she's basically won before literally every fight against her in everyone else's scenario.

Also, I can't get over this moment from Mamizou's scenario.

This makes me want a short Touhou story where Mamizou convinces Zanmu to come with her to the outside world to show her modern things and Zanmu just...has no fucking clue what's going on. Keep in mind, Zanmu has been staying in Hell for thousands of years at this point, and aside from Hecatia raiding three Hot Topics at once every now and then, Zanmu has no idea what the modern world even looks like.

What I'm trying to say is, I wanna see Mamizou give Zanmu a bag of doritos, they should go on a road trip around modern Japan together.