Personal Assistant Hatsune Miku

EDIT: fixed some highlights in the hair... not sure how that happened.
So for those of you that may not know, I'm sort of a Hatsune Miku fanboy. And for those of you that may not know, Hatsune Miku is the world's first fully-digital popstar. Along with the absolutely adorable character design, she's got hundreds of songs, had concerts, and been on several tours all without having an actual, physical... anything, pretty much. The only human part of her is a Japanese voice actress they took small voice samples from in order to synthesize the voice. Think... text-to-speech technology meets music synthesization meets the very same kind of technology that brought Tupac back from the dead for one more concert, and you basically have Miku. I could continuously gush about how cool the Vocaloid software behind her is -- about how easy it is for literally anyone to use, as all you have to do is click in the notes and type in the lyrics and you too can have your own Hatsune Miku song -- but at that point I'd be chasing rabbits.

SO! This art piece here. Taken everything established about Hatsune Miku and what she represents, what's the best way I see to portray her? Why, as a digitized personal assistant in a cybernetic world, of course! Okay, maybe not, but inspiration is a strange mistress.

As I've said a million times, I'm super proud of this one piece in particular. This is the one that I was talking about when I said it didn't look all that great in sketch stage but really started coming together when I started coloring. For Miku's design (since this is basically the first time I've drawn her), I wanted to try and imitate the official Vocaloid style while at the same time adding my own unique twists to the character, and I couldn't be happier with the result. I'm especially proud of the way she's sort of in the process of "digitizing" into being, something I picked up from the Archie Comics' Sonic the Hedgehog comics and the character NICOLE, who's often seen doing the very same thing.

Now, one concern I had going into this was the digital world background behind Miku. I had a general idea what I wanted it to look like, but the actual execution escaped me for the longest time until I'd finished coloring Miku herself and had a bit of an epiphany -- an idea... inspiration, if you will. With nothing but my own intellect and ability to go on, I threw something at the wall, and thankfully, it stuck. It stuck surprisingly well.

Final note about this piece. For a lot of my artwork from the past... oh... few years or so... I've always either picked colors from a color guide I'd found online or mixed my own to get everything just right. When I got to work on this thing, I decided I'd try something different and use only the standard color palette provided by Inkscape for everything -- fill colors, shading, highlights... you name it. Luckily, Inscape has a pretty expansive default color palette, and I gotta say, I'm really impressed with the colors they gave me. They're bright and vibrant, but they mix well and no one color stands out garishly among the others to make your eyeballs bleed.

Anyway, yeah. Hatsune Miku. Look her up sometime, because the technology behind her is nothing short of impressive.