Lost In Musical Daydreams

A while back I was browsing though old pictures and I stumbled upon the HAM Japan on Air cover. It was an ok picture, but the fact that I'd coloured Hamja's hair the wrong shade of purple (it was too blue) bothered me. So instead of digging up the old file and changing it, I decided to draw something completely new!

Overall I like the way it looks, but there were 3 elements that bugged me;
1) dress design - I couldn't get it right! The first design had weird cuffs that wouldn't look like, the second design is the one I used, and the third design was a detailed version of her normal dress, which I still didn't like since I couldn't draw it in this pose. The second design definitely works the best; it gave me lots of room to use the pattern brush, lots of layers and lace, and it looks alot like another picture I did back in February - and I still love that picture!
2) The gramophone - the gramophone itself didn't bother me, but I thought about combining it with headphone so it'd look a bit stranger. I begged the question on FB and got the response of 'They don't go together!' '..........they don't. which is why I was going to draw them together in the first place!' In the end, the headphones didn't work with the pig ears, so I remived them all together
3) Background - my God, I have never wanted to take a mallet to my netbook so much in my life! Not only did the background not want to move at all, but it spend 30 minutes buffering for it to do absolutely nothing! I took my netbook to HAM Japan to work on this, and really wound myself up about this background because of how needlessly persistant it was! (Someone eventually tried to take the pen off me so I wouldn't stab mysef with it and we had a tug-of-war. So there are a couple of teeth marks in my pen now....)

Other than all that, went off without a hitch! ^_^

Art copyright to me!
Hamja copyright to myself and !

P.s. there is an actual HAM Japan crest on that gramophone - just pointing that out because I'm proud of myself