Hello, all; been a while for me posting any images, hasn't it?

Here is my entry for MikuXHatsune's "Imperfections" challenge. I had recently created this character (as an OC, but she actually started out as my character in Animal Crossing: City Folk... or at least, that's who she's based on anyways), but because the most I had done was just ink in the outline, I figured that I could add to her character by giving her an imperfection.

This is Orenji; she's usually pretty cheerful, but among other things, one thing really makes her self-conscious: her psoriasis (the "p" is silent). It's pretty much isolated to the back of her hands, but because her hands are in plain sight most of the time (when she's not covering them up with her sleeves or hiding them behind her back), she feels self-conscious, worried that people are somehow going to judge her. It weighs on her self-esteem, especially when she thinks about how girls her age usually have really soft and smooth hands while hers are red, irritated, and bumpy.

Now to explain why I chose to give her psoriasis: maybe an obvious statement, but I have it. On the back of my hands, too. So I guess in a way this is calling attention to what psoriasis is, for those who don't know about it especially.

It's a hereditary condition (meaning no matter how bad it looks, it's not contagious) that causes the skin to become inflamed and start producing cells more rapidly than usual; this causes the skin to become red, scaly, and sometimes flaky. I don't know the actual numbers, but there may be a number of people out there who don't know what it is, and thus might shy away from people who have it, thinking it might be contagious (and they're too shy about asking because they don't want to seem impolite). Hence Orenji's fears.

As for other information (yes, I'm just making this part up as I go :P)

Age: 18
Height: 5'2"
Birthday: October 19th (why not make it today, since I'm finishing up the basics for her character?)
Favorite color: Orange
Favorite smell: Blooming orange blossoms
Favorite food: Yakitori (what, did you think I was going to say oranges? :D)
College Major: Undecided, but she's on the tennis team.

Well, with all that said, enjoy!

This picture was sketched in pencil, outlined with Prismacolor fine line markers (there's got to be a way to keep them from fading while erasing -_-U), scanned, colored and cleaned up in Manga Studio Debut 3.0, backgrounded (why yesh, I made that word up :3) and watermarked in Photoshop Elements 10, and the bottom edge was raised in MS Paint for Windows 7 (apparently, Citrus was unnerved that her legs just ended partway up in the picture... well sorry for not drawing all of her XD)

EDIT: Oh yeah, also forgot to mention: after recently hearing about an anime that had the characters all outlined with brown instead of black, I wanted to try doing the same thing here, so the outlines are in dark brown. Just saying :)