stage - 2026, Februray 2nd

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Description

"stage" is a drawing of Renko and Maribel. The designs are completely fan-made, as this drawing was mostly me trying out redesigning them myself.
In the background is a chalkboard with various physics expressions and diagrams, partially covered by stage curtains. The wooden floor has a pile of books and a few cards lying around, while the foreground has another pile of books on Renko's side, and another stage curtain on Merry's.

Designs

Renko

The title I had for Renko was "Celestial Physicist", and was fully inspired by Magical Astronomy. Most of the designs incorporate celestial objects as yellow highlights, while mostly featuring cool colors.
This was an intentional choice, as I usually draw Renko with warm colors, and I wanted to switch it up a bit. Her blouse and sleeves were mostly inspired by the "puffy," old-timey wrinkly outfit I typically associate with scholar type characterss.
Her skirt was made into three parts, the top being the overlay, and the remaining two being the constellation-patterned underlay. The constellations were taken from an actual screenshot of a sky (although it was actually daytime, oops), along with some compass markers. The skirt is also separated into two parts, the left side representing the Northern hemisphere, and the right side representing the Southern hemisphere.
I also thought she would look cool in black tights and sharp "spiky" boots.

Regarding the background elements, the chalkboard can be separated into two parts. The top part is a bunch of equations I put together haphazardly using the celestial sphere, Kepler's laws, etc. to physically explain Renko's ability. Of course, because there wasn't that much thought put into it, and most of it is a gross oversimplification, they don't really contain any substance.

The bottom half is somewhat related to Merry's ability, but specifically in the way the Renko understands them, mostly involving quantum physics. Because I am not a physics major and I haven't taken any quantum mechanics courses yet, I just scraped relevant-looking equations from Wikipedia.
Most of the content here is taken from Dr. Latency's Freak Report and Taboo Japan Disentanglement. Specifically, the part where time is defined as a wavefunction of two parameters, the date '7/7', and the part where the Higgs boson is (attempted) to be represented using a three-dimensional graph is taken from Taboo Japan Disentanglement, while the rest mostly comes from Dr. Latency's Freak Report.

One of the books on the floor is titled "Fundamental Wavefunctions," which is also a nod at Renko's hypothesis in Taboo Japan Disentanglement.

Maribel

The title I had for Renko was "Boundary Magician", and I attempted to take elements from Magical Astronomy, but Merry's design in Magical Astronomy turned out a bit too simple. Therefore, I ended up using design elements from Taboo Japan Disentanglement, as well as Yukari Yakumo. While Renko had a starfield pattern on the back side of clothing elements, Merry has a messy reddish background with eyes, representing the "boundary" part of her design. Her gloves, the ribbons, the coins used in place of the buttons, the cards on the floors and the stage curtains were made to reinforce the "magician" part.
The lotus on her hat symbolises Renko, as well. The colors used mostly revolve around a neutral purple, and even some cool dark blues, but I did try to incorporate as many warm colors as I could, just how I did the opposite with Renko. That's mostly why there are so many bright pinks used all around. Additionally, since Renko predominantly uses golden accessories, I wanted to give Merry some silver ones to contrast one another.
Her outfit is also much more frilly and "pretty," in order to fit the "performer" aspect a bit more. The horizontal line pattern on her dress was taken from Yukari's trigrams on her Antinomy of Common Flowers design.
The silver "button" and the chain running to the other side was a representation of quantum entanglement (from Taboo Japan Disentanglement), and the other side would have an upward-pointing arrow with a red ring, as that seems to be quite a common trope for visually representing entanglement of two particles.

All in all, since unlike Renko, I didn't really have a concrete idea for Merry, most of it was just taking references from other designs, as well as trying to contrast Renko.
(Also, I am aware that she has a literal "bra" on her chest. I was mostly thinking about symbols to put on the coins, and just decided to take some basic symbols from quantum mechanics, as I usually do, and then realised how stupid of a pun I did.)

Motive

I wanted to try out character design for fun, and also make an illustration based on that. Because Renko and Maribel are typically very simple characters to draw, I wanted to try something a bit harder. The main concept was to have them be mostly centered around their Magical Astronomy designs (as well as their titles, "Physicist" and "Magician"), and also a bit of Taboo Japan Disentanglement for Maribel.

I also wanted a less static pose for both of them, and ended up on making only Merry sit on the floor, while Renko was standing. This naturally led me to draw Merry look slightly up at Renko, which was also a pose/angle I was trying to work on for a while. This was also meant to be an inversion and upgrade of night, a drawing I did a long time ago.

Another thing is, I usually go more for a "cute" style, which is especially visible in the last two drawings, shelf and nap, which made me want to go for the "cool" aesthetic for once.

Process

The entire drawing was made using Sketchbook. The first step was to draw the poses of the characters, using generic human figures. After that, I decided to do the designs on a separate layer, drawing small, badly-drawn front-facing figures. I then translated those designs into the actual piece, by drawing the hair and clothing around the pose I drew at the start. Finally, I did the flat colors, and then the shading.
After that, I started work on the background, starting with the composition of the objects on the wall and in the foreground. After that, I drew the objects on the floor, and finally went on the details like the chalkboard and the patterns on the cards.
The final step was refining the shading (because the characters were shaded before the background was made, some of the colors didn't fit as well), adding some glow, and then adding the dust effect you see in indoor light beams.

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