This piece is an extremely sentimental one for me.

I had the pleasure and extreme honor of meeting Ikuko Itoh, Junichi Sato, Yasuno Sato, and Jay Hickman at Ushicon 2019.  It was an incredibly humbling experience.  This piece was later given as a gift to said creators.  During this time I also attended a panel that focused on the process of the creation of the series from concept to the final product and got their autographs as well.  (Pictures below).   You can find the transcript here.   

I later found out that Itoh-sensei has it on display at her house.  How embarassing!

The idea behind this piece was I wanted to portray the elegance and the whimsical nature of the series while also alluding to the fate of this character.  This is why in the illustration the top half is fading away.  Initially, I wanted her to have the wing arms from her original concept art and from the finale, but I only had one night to make this illustration before I had to catch a flight, and so I had to make it as simple as possible.  

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The original concept for this is actually a huge series tribute project, but as I mentioned there was a huge time restriction due to real life circumstances and so I had to truncate it to just Princess Tutu herself.   I definitely hope that I can find the time to finish the full illustration at a later time, but since this version was gifted to the creators I figured it needed its own page.  

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Unlike, other illustrations I've done I did not use lineart for this because I wanted the texture to be different compared to the rest of the full concept version.  She is meant to be more of a spiritual character in the finalized version of this illustration.  So even though this is a digital illustration it uses more traditional techniques it terms of how the colors were laid down. 

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Anyways, I really hope you guys like this illustration and look forward to seeing the final version when it eventually comes out.