The theme for this was "Ten Years, Ten Yo-kai", so I wanted to draw ten Yo-kai mascots representing the original series. Reasoning for doing this than the two spin-offs is because I wanted to celebrate what made the franchise great in the first place (not for the sake of nostalgia-pandering like Level-5 is doing >_<). I also avoided characters that were connected to other "factions" (Nekomata being associated with Forever Friends Yo-kai and Bakera being asscoiated with Y-Gakuen Yo-kai/Onryo).

I wanted to put Punkupine and Shirokuma as the tenth "mascot" to represent the YW4 era but those were moreso of lesser-known characters. I almost went with Koalanyan in the end, despite being a character made for a movie tie-in blended well with the YW3 characters and Hovernyan but it felt too one-time. I went with Komami as the tenth character since they played more of a role in the era overall (despite not making an appearance in YW4).

I didn't want to go overboard with the anniversary drawing because 1; I still feel a tad burnt out from the other anniversary drawing I posted last month, 2; I'm still getting used to my new screen tablet and 3; I didn't want to cram too much space while still balancing overall composition. But I still had a sort of "simple, yet effective" policy while conceptualizing this piece; making it unique as possible but still simplistic.

By that, I mean making Yo-kai interact with one another rather than just cheering at the fourth wall. This gives the drawing more of a "party" feeling than just a "congratulations!", which is different from the usual fare of celebratory drawings for anniversaries. For the background, even took notes from a title card of a certain cartoon, to the point of picking colours from it as the palette.

It took forever to adjust stuff because I kept flipping the canvas and many many things were off...but after a few adjusments and overall changes, I found a perfect balance. Though it may have been absurd to do a big drawing after tablet tests, it seemed like a sorta suitable task considering I've had years of experience in doing digital art...even though I still have ways to go. In the end, this was more of a "experimental development" big drawing than a "showing off what skills I can do" kind in comparison to my last big anniversary drawing...but it still had over a thousand layers.