Snowflake

Long overdue Kei commission (as with every commission really lol).

This one started with just the idea of having her sitting in the "W" pose (as seen from above) and then the rest was up to me. I figured Id focus on making it as soft and cute as I could and so I brought back the hairstyle with the frontal twintails which is just perfect for this kind of thing. Then the expression and body language did the rest, as usual.

Once again I tried adding glitter to the hair and clothes and it looks so good, I think mostly for two reasons. The first being that it just adds detail in general, and the second that it gives me "starry sky" vibes. Since its two for two now I guess youll be seeing it a lot more from now on, I just have to be careful to not overuse it which is easy to fall into whenever you find a new "thing" you like.

Anyway, this one was a big rollercoaster, because every time I took a break and looked at it again I switched between "this looks amazing" and "this looks like crap", lol. Plus I was really undecided on what to go for with the final look too.

As you can see from the process pic, I tried to keep the soft pastel colors the whole way through with big focus on that lavender of the hair, but the problem is that I reached a point where it looked really flat with no contrast. This was especially obvious when I looked at it on my phone, so I went back and tried a bunch of things but I just couldnt figure out how to do what I wanted so I opted for the vibrant and colorful look instead, at the cost of the more "magical" and nightly feel it had before. Its one of those things that make art so frustrating, because you just cant win.

Also for the background I thought of just doing the same one from the first Kei pic back in 2019 (almost 4 years now), but with a very different feel due to the winter/snow theme. So its meant to be both new and nostalgic at the same time.

All in all I spent longer on this than expected. At first it was going super smoothly but when I hit that wall with the colors and stuff, everything quickly went downhill and it killed my momentum. I was hoping to get more things done this week but in the end this was the only one I could finish, though I did work on a bunch more sketches at least. I just wish everything would go as smoothly as "Sheer", lol.