Okay, here's the story about this pic. Two days ago I found a topic in the forum posted by SamuraiNataku asking people to do art trades with her. I quickly looked at her gallery and which characters she wanted illustrated the most and this came forth. Not sure exactly why she's wearing her polar coat while at the beach (especially in the water... XD), but hey-maybe there were guys around and she didn't have a swimsuit underneath? I dunno. I know her character daydreams and spaces out a lot, so maybe she forgot she had it on... I had started it out as a drawing with her arms crossed instead, but I finally gave up and took the cheap route, making her lower body in water instead. XD

This sketch was penciled using a 0.7 mechanical pencil for the rough structure then expanded using a 4H drawing pencil. Also, a gum eraser was used... A lot. XD For the rough structure I drew for about a couple minutes just looking at the source image and then looking down at my horrible sketch to modify it thereafter. I scanned it in at 600 dpi to get all the lines, then cloned over the unnecessary chaff. That took me about forty-five minutes. Then I decided that I wanted to color it badly, and so I spent two hours on that in Gimp 2.0 on my tablet pc... XD ... And then dA went into maintenance mode immediately after I logged in and clicked submit. So I tried waiting and read some comics and listened to some music for an hour and went to bed. :'( Hope she likes it! XD Took me two hours and forty-five minutes all in all.

Nataku is copyright to

Original images are here: [link] ...and here!: [link]