The night is still young.

Self Critique: I do kinda wish I made Smogmella’s kimono a bit more ghostly a bit earlier as it looks more like a regular kimono. Insomni’s arm is stiff, a result of having her body hover over Smogmella too high. As such, I should’ve hunched her over more. Also I’m not pleased with the elbow area of that arm.

Addressing: Insomni’s arm over the kimono strap. It should actually be inside the strap, not outside it. It was a massive oversight on my part as I never realized my mistake until I shaded everything in. I tried to fix it, but too many layers overlapped, so I had to make due with what I had. If anything, just think of it as Insomni getting a headstart on Smogmella.

I never actually played Yo-kai Watch, however one day on Twitter, one of the people I followed was posting pics of both Insomni and Smogmella from Yo-kai Watch. I think he sent me a DM regarding pics of them and it gave me idea. Sadly, I think he got suspended from Twitter as I can’t find his messages. However I remember saving some of the images to use as references. I checked on Pixiv to see if they had noteriety, and sure enough they did. So it was off to work I went.

I actually started work on this pic several months ago, and just recently started work on the background. Regarding the poses, I did something rather ghetto. I had a pose book that I downloaded and basically took two poses and spliced them together. I worked well enough for me to get an idea of what I needed to do. It did get rather tough though when it came time to get Insomni’s arm into position to grab Smogmella’s boob since the pose reference had both arms going straight down. Smogmella was easier to work on since she wouldn’t be doing much interaction besides booping Insomni’s boob.

When I finished everything, I was ready to make a simple, purple and foggy background and call it a day. But the wave it was part of (which included the Puzzle Gals and Iristar) already had simple backgrounds. So I went ahead and decided to put them in a tatami room. I tilted the completed girls to see if it would be better since the original orientation made things look static. Turned out to be a good call as it made things look more dynamic. I pulled up several references for tatami rooms to better understand what was actually in there. I would going to add lanterns to the ceiling, however I got confused as to whether or not that was a thing with feudal era tatami rooms. I ended up realizing that I could do it after I saw them in Muramasa Rebirth. Eventually, I realized it would be better to just put simple ones on the floor like one of the reference photos showed. As for the lighting, I actually colored in everything like normal. When that was done, I put down a dark blue/purple filter, and then started lightly airbrushing away areas where the light would shine and rebound off of (like from the lanterns and outside). The end result actually looks pretty damn cool. I got the idea from a Japanese artist on twitter that put up a gif of a pic he was doing, and he applied a dark filter near the end to make the pic look like it was during the night. Usually I thought it would be better to make it take place at night from the get-go by using darker colors since my experience with dark filters was pretty bad. But Clip Studio Paint made things easier to deal with, and actually looks better. So from now on, I’ll be using dark filters for night scenes.

Done on Clip Studio Paint. Intuos4 tablet used.
Yo-Kai Watch, Smogmella and Insomni are (c) Nintendo/Level 5