The Phantom Inker

Happy New Year, everybody! 2026 is the Year of the Horse (午年), and Year of the Fire Horse to be specific (丙年), and Reika (莉華) here loves that after waiting her entire life, it's finally her year! All dressed up in her prettiest kimono, she's out enjoying the fireworks, and she'll toast the start of her best year with her friends and a masu or three of the best sake she can find :D

...sorry it's a bit late. I started drawing her on New Year's Eve, December 31, and then got really really sick and could barely function for a week. But Reika is a ready a month before the Chinese New Year on February 17, so I'm going to claim she's still on time! A high-resolution copy can be found on the Patreon!

No AI was used in this picture. The background has an interesting very technical origin, though, which is that I knew what I wanted the fireworks and the buildings to look like, so I wrote some JavaScript to draw fireworks that were exactly what I wanted (modeling out the movement of the sparks with gravity and noise!), and then I wrote another script to draw some "buildings" (varying rectangles with lights!) that would fit in the background, and I made each of those scripts render a whole bunch randomly and I tweaked and tweaked the results and finally picked my favorites. I hand-edited a few of them, smushed them together, added some smoke for the fireworks and some blur for the buildings, and boom, a perfect New Year's scene over — I'm gonna say Neo-Tokyo :D

In total, this was like four hours on New Year's Eve, and a really solid full day today, so maybe 16 hours total effort? Still, I love how it turned out: Reika is living her absolute best life and she knows it :)

+Favs are goodies but +comments are besties! :D