An abandoned foreigner in a strange land. She's taken in by a small town yet is looked down upon by the citizens. However, the mayor's son finds the woman's unique manner and features to be most "intriguing." Of course, the strapping young man is already arranged to be married. That's a given. Gotta love forbidden love. Yep yep. This is one of the few times the blossoming couple actually have a moment to themselves, hidden by the darkness and blooming sakura blossoms... to bad it's a full moon :P

In all honesty this concept just arose as I was making this piece :P It started out as just a little practice sketch. I was following a beautiful drawing made by Messa (http://messa.deviantart.com/). So many thanks to her otherwise this piece would never exist. She definitely gets credit for the pose though I did go back and fix some of the awkward proportions. Anyways I was just doing this as a practice and decided to use a pair of my friend's characters for fun... then finally I just said screw it and decided to go all the way with this one.

It's a little racier than my other works (you can see her butt! *gasp*) but I still really like it. I don't know about the rest of you but I always find the moment right before the kiss to actually be sexier than the kiss itself. I guess I'm just weird like that.

This is the first times I can honestly say that I spent more time on the background than I did on the characters. The coloring of the people themselves is rather simple but I think the scenery makes up for it. It took a long time to get the perspective right since I hate perspective but I'm pretty sure that it's about right. Had fun applying the wood texture to the planks though I definitely enjoyed doing the sakura blossoms the most. I'm sad that I had to mute out and darken the vibrant colors so much since it was a night scene but I guess that's what makes night, night. What's more I had to crop out a good portion of it because my measurements on the original piece had been wrong. Even so, I still like how it came out. Any and all comments are greatly appreciated! ^^ Thank you!

TIME: No idea... probably at least a good 15 hours.
LAYERS: 44 (though probably a lot more since I kept merging them :P)

Wood/Paper Textures: www.mayang.com/textures/
Clothing Patterns: http://patterns.ming-ling.net/about.html