Merei

This is my entry for the mascot contest organized by Aselia Con ( [link] ). The task was to design a mascot for the con (a Tales OC).

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About the character design:

Since the con's name is Aselia, which is the name of the world in Tales of Phantasia (and Symphonia and Eternia), I picked the colour scheme to be what I imagine when I hear the word "Aselia". It always reminds me of the title screen of Phantasia and the World Tree. I also added a tail-like feature on her top, it's a little reference to Tabatha from Tales of Symphonia, she was kind of an outsider (not human, not elf, not even halfelf) but still not forgotten or discriminated (okay, Mithos was kinda mean to her at some point|D), a bit like we in the west feel at the time of Tales of Festival: most of us can't go there but we still get news translated from there.

The name, Merei, is kind of a wordplay. It comes from the kanji 召 "meshi" = invitation, and 精霊 "seirei" = spirit (in Tales 精霊 is translated into "summon spirit"). In the games where Aselia is the world, the summon spirits are quite important, and I think Aselia Con is like "summoning Tales fans together to have fun" so the name came from that.
I don't know Japanese well enough to actually play much with the words but I thought this could work and I generally suck at coming up with names for character so I'll go with it.
Also, if Merei was a party member in a Tales game she would most likely be a summoner.

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I originally wanted to give her a stroke of other colour on her hair (like Judith has, and some npc in ToX), but then I completely forgot about it when I was colouring the picture;_; Well, I also tried to keep the design as Tales-like as possible, specifically I love ToS and TotA designs (Kousuke Fujishima's work<3). I used the fringe option (in SAI) when shading this one too. Also added some other colours and tones in the shading than just "darker than the base" and coloured the lineart. I dunno which one I like better, the coloured lineart or black... Well, I like the result enough to post itxD

Hope you like her too Wish me luck to the contestxD

Tales of series (c) Namco Bandai
art (c) *ScytheDancer