HAPPY MIKU DAY!!!! :D
to celebrate this year, we're bringing you a miku collab!! wooo!!
vocaloid was a significant part of my teens, so i was pretty excited to work on this one. i wanted to base the look of my miku on one of the vocaloid artists i grew up with, so i chose siinamota (aka PowapowaP). its actually his birthday today too, so its pretty fitting!!!
siinamota's album Award Strobe Hello was the first vocaloid album i ever downloaded and i listened to it quite a lot in high school. i first found siinamota through his titular Strobe series, starting with Strobe Light. i think its still one of my favorite songs of all time.
my first pass at miku started with a generic miku-y head, featuring some brick separator twin tails. after that i made her a body, using a 2598 10x10 octagonal windscreen in tan (which i had to tear apart my aero nomad to acquire ;A;) as a poofy dress. i had originally thought to give her a scarf, as i remember a lot of siinamotas artwork often featured girls wrapped up in scarves. the red cylinder piece didnt really flow very well with the rest of the body though, so i scrapped it in favor of some collar detailing to match her tie.
this time i managed to remember to take some photos of the internal structures. its umm… pretty janky. lol. the round tile and jumper behind the red tie are kinda just sandwiched in there… same with the rubber liftarm holding the skeleton arm that attaches the double cheese slopes. the back assembly that holds the arms on uses a 3628 bar clip… thingy… (does anyone have a good name for these things??) to attach the arms at the angle i wanted. i hadnt used one before, but i really like how narrow they are. perfect for the smaller builds i tend to do. lastly the dark brown slopes under the arms are… not attached to anything. but the arms keep them in place when folded down, i swear!
lastly to try and tie her more to the original artwork for Award Strobe Hello, i gave her some goggles and a pair of headphones, with the cable trailing offscreen. i sliced up some white stickers to try and recreate the tear in her tights from the album cover too. i was pretty happy with her, but i thought she still looked a little plain. to finish things off i made her some eyes, by painting on some blank sticker sheets i had and carefully cutting them out. im pretty happy with the slightly melancholic, moe look she has u-u.
make sure you check out the rest of the mikus in the collab!! you can view them here:
todays song is of course a siinamota song - Strobe Light. but you should totally check out the rest of the strobe series!! theres also Sayonara Remember-san, Strobe Hello, Hello Strobe, Strobe Last and Strobe Last [lost shadow]. theyre all great and mean a lot to me.
thanks for reading! ^-^
woof
bonus ramble (tw suicide mention):
siinamota is probably most well known for things other than his stobe series now - Young Girl A blew up via tiktok pretty recently, and currently has 139 million views, as well as a pretty insane comment section (seriously, theres like new comments every few minutes, even to this day). and if you look in those comments, youll see the other thing hes well known for now - his suicide.
its kind of stupid, but i remember having a somewhat gatekeeper-y reaction to finding out about the recent popularity. siinamota had been my special thing when i was younger, and i'd already gone through learning about his death as it had only just happened recently when i started listening to him. seeing all the RIPs and infodumps being brought back from almost 10 years ago made me a little irritated. i think i was just being a bit of a snob at the time though, lol.
ive been going back and relistening to a lot of his stuff this week while building this, and it's made me reflect on those newer fan comments a bit more. a lot of them seem like they're from younger users, and they remind me of how i felt listening to siinamota back in high school. he has a certain sense of melancholy and wistfulness in his music that i used to relate to, and i see a lot of other people do to. i wonder if its the first time a lot of them are dealing with suicide - not just the concept of it, but the reality of someone meaningful to them having died that way. or maybe they have had to deal with that, and it gives those songs even more meaning. idk. im not very good at talking about this stuff, but it did make me feel some kind of connection to all these people id previously felt annoyed by. i didnt like the idea of siinamota being known as 'the guy who killed himself', but maybe it makes his work resonate with even more people and provide comfort to a wider audience. and that makes me a bit happy.
sorry for the pretty off topic blogging, but also its my blog and i can blog about whatever i wanna freaking blog about… B)
ok but really thanks for reading!! and happy birthday siinamota!! <3