Goodbye April Doppel steps

Step by step process for mapledragon.deviantart.com/art…

1. Sketch: There was a vague image of Miku that would always pop up in my head whenever I listened to the song, so I ended up sketching it out. The original image had a white background, flowing white hair for Miku, and some daisies drifting around.

2. Line: I hate lineart I couldn't seem to get the flow of Miku's hair right, so I painted some rough silhouettes to help me out.

3. Completed line: done with the line! My first few attempts on lining the hair turned out to be too detailed for my taste, so I simplified it down to general shapes.

4. Flat colors + basic cell shading: I'm very bad with lighting so I try to plan it out with some basic shadows. As I started painting Miku's hair, I realized how plain it looked with color.

5. Finalized hair: After many changes and more lineart added, I finally completed the hair. I wanted the flow to look...balanced. When I flipped the original canvas over, she looked kind of lop-sided because all of her hair on the left side was flowing forward. I was going for a more drifting feel, so I had to make some changes.

6. Everything else + water: The rest of the picture took almost no time. I've never tried drawing water like this before, so I looked up some pictures of water splashing and played around with some brush settings. Once I got the hang of it, it was really easy.

7. Finishing touches: I was originally going to keep the background white, but after coloring in everything else, it looked really boring. I played around with various colors until I finally decided to settle down on an orange-yellow to match the video for Goodbye April Doppel.