One of the most fun designs I've worked with in the style, I've absolutely got to a stage where I'm very much happy with my ability to create art in this style.

Largely this piece compared to the others is still the most WIP as it's not even animated yet, but I absolutely love the state it is in now as it showcases a huge chunk of how I personally see Rin Satsuki's design. While mostly referenced in the original design we saw of Rin from ZUN's picture of her on that poster from long ago, things like the color and design in places we didn't see were original takes.



For one, the socks as opposed to the shoes most everyone in TPDP wear is a call back to the fact that Touhou characters of the past would almost always wear socks. It is seriously everywhere in ZUN's art between post PC-98 and Touhou 8, so I figured it would be very fitting to have Rin Satsuki wear them as opposed to shoes in reference to that era she was originally slated for where is very freaking likely she would have socks like everyone else.



There is an idea that Reimu's a character that represents the 'eastern' side of Touhou, and has red and white colors, while Marisa represents the 'western' side of Touhou, and has yellow and black colors. In fact, ZUN has stated that Touhou itself is a series aiming at merging East and West, to how much that succeeds is up to debate, but there is certainly the influence.



The reason I bring this point up at all is because Rin Satsuki is typically drawn with a combination of all of the colors of Reimu and Marisa, which leads me to believe that this is a subtle idea that Rin Satsuki uses these colors because she's meant to represent a combination of east and west as a possible third to Reimu and Marisa themselves. This is why I have chosen details like Rin's eye color to be orange, which is a combination of red and yellow of Reimu and Marisa's primary colors, for example. Of course, I did leave out a lot of black in things like outfit outside of the outlining, so I guess it is missing that, but in the event I release the final idea for the 'shiny' color palette for this sprite, that will probably be fixed.



Also, this sprite is very much inspired by this. This sprite itself is something that built off Reimu's sprite from TPDP, so I wanted to use this to bring out Rin Satsuki's original design aspects in a way that gave the original idea behind this sprite more of its great potential.



...Wow, I realized how much more I had to say about this one compared to the other art pieces I did in this style, lol. I regret this wasn't on something that had more progress, but I absolutely love doing this one, so I know progress wouldn't be far off from now; perhaps I should write an autobiography for Rin too...