I spent last month designing some exclusive designs for Hanafusa Okiya. They confessed themselves quite satisfied with my work but, of course, as an artist and perfectionist, I will lose sleep for many a night regretting every wonky pixel. Also, while designing the uchiwa HUD for Hanafusa, I came to realize there were still some bugs in the maiougi HUD. I’ll have to fix, repackage and resend a LOT of fans now…

I confess that the maiougi were rather easy to iterate, since I was instructed to pretty much copy the original references as closely as possible. The uchiwa, however, were a challenge to design because a) I had to break my own rules by using an excessive amount of tris and b) I had to copy by hand some of the shodo work in the original reference.

It is only when you’re looking at the finest details that you notice errors in the reference and the real temperament of Second Life’s upload system. Respectively: the stroke order is wrong and Second Life cannot fathom quads living in close quarters with an array of tris. Also, the original references had photoshopped their designs on top of the exact same golden fan… and so did I. X-D

I promise I’ll take some shodo classes here in Germany.