#beimu

This is a fun piece. I haven't had a lot of spoons for drawing for a while but I've been whittling away at this over the span of over a month, and I'm proud of how it turned out!

This was partly inspired by this post, but funnily enough I only remembered it after I'd done a lot of work on this piece's sketch. Sakuya has learned what oxygen is at least twice throughout Touhou, and personally I think she's just fucking with people. Coupling that with Reimu's more surly attitude and overworkedness felt fundamentally right to me. They would totally do this.

My bestie @banmitbandit also helped me out when I couldn't figure out what to do with Reimu's head angle and facial expression so give them a thanks! Go into their askbox and say "thanks", do it now!

I also wanted to do palette swaps again! I freaking love palette swaps, I want to make that my whole brand at this point. The second image is based off of their alt costumes in Phantasmagoria of Flower View, the rest of Sakuya's are from Hisoutensoku, which I actually downloaded just so I could get a better look at the sprites. The pictures on the Touhou Wiki don't actually show Sakuya's braids or her eye colour so I had to go straight to the source. Her appearance is remeniscent of Remilia, Youmu, and maybe Flandre?

Reimu's appearance in the third image is more or less a straight translation of one of her alts from that game, it's very similar to Sanae, who I don't know that much about but seems to be something of a foil to Reimu. The other two alts of her I made myself! One is supposed to look like Marisa, the other is just that I saw a pink alt of Reimu from Antinomy of Common Flowers (by the way, I had no idea before that Sakuya wasn't in that game! That feels so weird!) and I wanted to do something cool with pink! I like pink, I think it's the best colour. I was thinking of doing more, but actually I kind of borked up the whole process with the coloured lines on Reimu's outfit, merged it with the regular lines layer, and also hit that layer with a gaussian blur making it *very* difficult to edit it and the lines. Marisa Reimu and Pink Reimu's lines were very involved, I had to make multiple correction layers to change the colours. If you notice, Reimu's eyebrow on the first image is different (and IMO better) than the others, that's also because I wasn't watching and holding onto my layers properly.