I have something of a history with drawing one-half of this duo, Yuzuruha. This wouldn’t be the first time I would draw her. Some time ago I did in fact draw her and she was posted online. However the circumstances around its posting left me unsatisfied. While I have more personal reasons for my dissatisfaction, the one reason I can at least say publicly is the time constraints I was put under to complete it left a sour taste. I wanted to make the pic more grander with a detailed background. However I had to downscale it. I said to myself that I’d come back to it and give it a real background and not a simple one. But that never happened.

I hold Vanillaware, the developers of Muramasa: The Demon Blade, to a very high regard. Even moreso its president and chief artist, George Kamitani. With that in mind, I decided that I’d start this over from scratch, without the any of the behind-the-scenes associations that the previous Yuzuruha pic had. And this time, I’d add Kongiku into the mix and go all out with this pic. You can see my attempts with the old concept sketches when I tried restarting this back in 2018. I remember having issues drawing Yuzu’s eyes during her old pic. This time I just went with my gut and did what I would normally do for sultry eyes, that way I don’t have to stress out about it when the pic proper starts. Her skin was also an issue since it was pale white to the point of gray, making it hard to control the shades. I eventually settled on referencing her figure, which gives her a more natural un-ghostly complexion that’s easier to manage. I also referenced a video of this same figure for the front of her kimono since we never get to see it in full in neither the promo art nor the in-game sprite (her hair covers most of it). Kongiku was more straight forward than Yuzuruha, so I won’t talk much about her here.

One thing I experimented with was shading in my red sketches. It turned out pretty good and was well received by my followers on Twitter. So I’ll go ahead and post them here to.