While I liked the design direction I took in my drawing of Keiki from New Years, I was feeling just a weeee bit dissatisfied so I decided to draw her again today. I also did a version with heavy lighting, mainly to test out how different blend modes would look together.
Artist's Notes;
Also if I feel like returning to this to add the second character I wanted to add but didn't feel like adding to the piece this is technically a WIP???? IDK I kinda like the drawing as is so I guess I'll save that idea for another time.
I'll keep this brief since I feel like my drawing of her from New Years is a good summary of my design process for her, this is just me adding some finishing touches. Didn't feel like rendering the flame effect that I gave her pupil in the New Years drawing of her, my main focus was on the rest of Keiki lol. I wanted to show off the lower part of her outfit since I wanted to draw more inspo from Kofun kimono.
So I kinda regretted not being able to incorporate her flower somehow in her original design, so I decided to overcompensate by putting almost 20 of them in a hole in her chest. Fun fact, this was initially going to be present in the New Years drawing but I couldn't figure out how to execute it. I really like the addition of the flowers though, it just pulls the design together somehow and I find it really adds to the idea that her body is hollow and made from clay, I love it. This design idea was actually inspired by Charon's design from Reverse 1999 who may or may not have had something to do with the initial idea for this piece outside of design inspiration and may or may not be the reason this drawing is technically a WIP, IDK who knows? No one knows! Except me, I know, but you don't ehehehehehe-
Another thing I initially wanted to include in my New Years Keiki redraw post was a tangent about my obsession with Disney theme park history and the Defunctland, especially Walt Disney's attempt at creating an autocratic dictatorship in a swamp in Florida (long story), where it would be the perfect utopian society and how that made me think of Keiki in Touhou 17 and ended up finding some narrative similarities between the two because that just felt so "Keiki-core" to me, also the production history of the Abraham Lincoln animatronic, that also feels like something Keiki would do. I pondered the ethics on this but realized that it didn't matter because again.... this man wanted an animatronic of Abraham Lincoln in his parks.... and later on Walt himself got turned into an uncanny animatronic so.... uh.... TLDR; Disney's corporate history is cool as fuck and good lord the company doing AI bullshit now hits so much different when you know how Walt actually felt about his animators...
Just wanna emphasize that I don't mean to make these comparisons one to one or rewrite Keiki entirely, mainly just getting inspired by stuff I'm really hyper fixated on and it giving me a new lens to interpret Keiki's character. And then that's when the headcannons start. I like the idea of Keiki having her equivalent of an "uncle walt" persona she uses talking to the human spirits and presenting herself as a "gracious and perfect goddess" who will be the one to fix them and make them "perfect" but behind the scenes that falls apart and she maintains this perfection through tight-nit control because she believes that's what's best for everyone, much like how Walt wanted to be the sole leader of his city of E.P.C.O.T. because he believed he knew what was best for everyone and his potential citizens and didn't actually think about what they would have actually wanted.
