Currently, Sky: Children of the Light and Mononoke are my two favorite things and I so very badly want to will this collaboration into existence. 🕯⚖️
Process GIF & artist commentary below the cut!
This began as a self-indulgent costume design project: aMononoke-inspired Sky cosmetic. It was supposed to be a quick-and-dirty mockup that would not be shared outside of private Discord servers, but I got...carried away.
It came out a lot nicer than anticipated. A bit rough around the edges, but when zoomed out clean enough to look like a legit Sky cosmetic. I extracted the high-res Sky and Mononoke logos from their respective websites. I custom-made the handhold collaboration icon. Then I slapped it on top of the costume design. It looked neat!
But then I started having second thoughts. The outfit was quite complex, and it didn't feel right to have it sit in a sterile, empty space like that. It looked half-baked, incomplete. So I used the Mononoke movie poster as inspiration for set dressing and color palette:
There are vestiges of the project's origins scattered throughout this piece - namely that a lot of the visuals were built upon screenshots from Sky. Since it was a costume design project, I didn't feel the need to draw from scratch. They were completely painted over in the final product, but using this technique sped up my process quite significantly!
I went to the Sky Wiki for references. I cobbled together some Season of Revival's kimono cosmetic as a starting point for the outfit. The eyeliner detail Days of Style mask looked similar to the Medicine Seller's face markings, so did a quick photoshoot in the Office to match the camera angle of the previous image.
For the lantern, I made a shared memory in the green room to get the ideal camera angles for each of them:
The grave markers I referenced from a photoshoot in the Hidden Forest's hub:
And the bridge I took from the Sunny Forest:
The butterflies were a last-minute addition - I wanted something to make the composition more sparkly! Then I remembered the end credits of Mononoke had a butterfly too! I figured since I went with the Medicine Seller's new design, this would be a nice homage to his classic look.