This is the final character design art for (from left to right) Arianne and Miran, original characters from The Day the Moon Shines. For those not familiar, TDtMS is a Skies of Arcadia shounen-ai fanfic, and Arianne helps Ramirez realize that, yes, even though Vyse is his enemy, he's falling for him--something that causes poor Rami a lot of grief. Miran is Arianne's companion and something of a guardian to her; however, he was a rebel (a terrorist, if you will) in Lower Valua, and he and his group was caught two years prior to the story by none other than Ramirez himself. One person in Miran's group was his younger brother, Leo, who just happened to be Arianne's lover. As such, Miran hates Ramirez's guts and wants to kill him. This obviously causes quite a bit of strife. However, despite Arianne's Sue-ishness and the clichéd nature of Miran's grudge, I rather like them both. They're more fleshed out in chapter 16, which is good, and in chapter 24 or so, they'll appear one last time to let that entire side-thread conclude properly. For your information, Arianne is 25 and 5'7" (same height as Vyse; though canonically, Ramirez is taller than Vyse, when we wrote the fic we assumed he was shorter, so in TDtMS, we treat Ramirez as if he's 5'6"), and Miran is 28 and 6'3".

I started this piece a while ago, but I put it down for a while and just yesterday finished it. Why? Well, when I first conceptualized this piece, I wanted to draw Arianne and Miran together, since they're so closely tied to each other. I found it much harder than I thought it would be to draw two completely different people together and keep them on the same scale. x_x;; First, I drew Arianne, and she was fine, though I had some trouble with her "antennae" and what the heck I was gonna do with her right hand (it was originally supposed to be threading through her hair, but I decided that would take too much work). Then I started on Miran, and my initial sketch made him totally out of proportion with Arianne, so I set down the drawing for a long while. After I did a practice sketch of what I wanted the pose to be, I started again and actually got his proportions right...but then I put it down again, and just yesterday, I picked it up, finished him, and colored them both, thanks to the Crayolas Ianthe gave me.

This drawing isn't the best I could have done--Miran's left hand is angled badly, and the shoes are meh--and neither is the coloring--you can tell I did Arianne first--but it's not bad, I think, even though I'm terrible at shading and it shows. This makes this piece the very first colored drawing I have in my gallery. <_<;; Oh yeah, and those two darker blue dots on Arianne's dress are from when I accidentally dropped the navy blue colored pencil.

Originally, Arianne's mini-cloak thing was going to be red and her dress pink, but I thought that her clothes already looked enough like Aerith's (from whom I got my inspiration) without ganking the colors, too. Oh, and I stole Miran's boots from Jillas from Slayers TRY, incidentally.

Drawn with mechanical pencil (.5 graphite) and colored with Crayola colored pencils.