Walking into the Sunshine

This drawing started out merely as an excuse to draw these two in the same frame again.

You might notice a style change: this is drawn using my new vector art style which I have gradually refined for several years to emulate marker strokes in manga. Since I'm drawing with mouse (yes, you are reading that correctly), this style is rather tricky, time-consuming, and require a lot of care on coloring; these are tradeoffs I made for its ability to carry a lot of details, nuances, and quirks in subtle variations of stroke width, in an effort to make the drawing look more organic.

In the foreground, I put in a subtle overexposed look to emphasize strong ambient sunlight, and also as an excuse not to draw a detailed background. And within that nondescript background, I made another rendering-performance excuse not to use any SVG filter; so the greenery your are seeing were actually hacked together from a bunch of gradient-filled objects, with a nice side effect of making them display properly under more-primitive SVG viewers which don't support filters.

Yeah, load of excuses were made in drawing this; but the main thing was I would like to draw something, with these two characters, that was simple, bright, and radiated comfiness. I didn't pay too much attention when naming this piece, but as I was halfway through the drawing, I came to a realization that this name was similar to the name of an ending credit song from an old anime film Doraemon: Nobita in the Robot Kingdom (2002): Banana Ice feat. Konishiki, Walking into Sunshine~.

YouTube (with English subtitle): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC6S1vT2ie4

I have listened to this song, but had never tried to find out the meaning of its lyrics before. It turned out to be a simple song about friendship, smile, and a promise made under sunshine. Cliche, but I think it kinda go along well with this piece, even that these concepts weren't what I originally had in mind when I started drawing it.

Both characters were last seen together in Departure From the Gallery; while the character in the back was last seen in Shaky Cameraboy. I should really start putting a real effort into drawing the latter in consistent fashion.

Note: The drawing is made for 16:9 aspect ratio, but extra care was taken to make it look reasonable under 4:3. To get a 4:3 version, just crop for the middle part of this drawing.

23 April 2023 edit: Added the missing copyright notice.
23 September 2023 edit: Correcting the previous edit's date.

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