"One-Week Girl: Patchouli Knowledge"

originally created January 25, 2025 ✦ republished February 5, 2025

My excitement, fear, and anticipation are off the charts...WELCOME TO MY BLOG!!!!!

This project took 2.5 weeks 😫 I did not expect it to take so long!!! It took up so much of my time, and there were so many unexpected obstacles...I had a plan in mind, and I fancied that it was pretty thorough, but I ended up having to deal with things like strange XML-based protocols, learning so many new Python libraries I'd never used before, dealing with timezone issues and finicky blogging clients and frigging character encodings.... I learned so much, but I think I kinda drowned in the learning because there was too much in my head and I was forcing myself to remember it all, all the little strings that connected my unexpectedly-MASSIVE project together...and that, piled on top of the intense anxiousness about making sure this super-meaningful-to-me project works without a hitch, as well as an unfortunate amount of sleep deprivation...put me out of commission for a few days. I've never had hives before 😓

I hope manually writing out the HTML of each post isn't disrupting my flow-of-consciousness style...because that's what I'm doing rn 😓 Ig I'll slowly grasp my way around this new system I've created for myself, take my time this time, and figure out how to best work with it, or perhaps adjust it to make things easier for me. I might explain why I put myself through this hell someday, but for now, I'd just like to welcome you to a VERY intense, VERY important-to-me endeavor in my quest to take advantage of the web's best-kept secrets in order to make an idiosyncratic passion-project node in the IndieWeb space (I'm rambling, dammit 😓), and move onto my usual style of post-making, minus all the character limits of traditional social media.

God, this feels so weird...I'm allowing myself to ramble as much as I want because my character limit is over 30 times larger than Instagram's character limit, but...ig typing things in HTML for a blog is throwing me off. I'll get used to it, or I'll adjust my interim editing client to automatically clean up my post text for me. Right, where was I? On Instagram, my usual format for post descriptions—at least before I got bored of posting and fell quiet—was to narrate some silly life stuff, then describe the artwork itself. So now you're in the latter half of a typical insanely-long Prayag post!! Congratulations, you've made it this far 🫡

The reason the Touhou Project series is an incredible artistic inspiration is because of how diverse ZUN's own inspirations are. Take Patchouli Knowledge, for example—her magic is based on elements, but they're Eastern elements from something called Wu Xing, and each element is assigned to a day of the week. That's why she's called the "One-Week Girl". When I found out about this, I was SUPER-fascinated by it and wanted to draw something for it, and so the thought of what I'd draw lingered in the back of my mind until I finally got to creating the thing. I worked on this over the course of two consecutive days, and despite the apparent high-detail, the drawing process was actually pretty nice and satisfying to draw.

The artwork itself is an elegant blend of work done in two different apps: Inkscape and Krita. Krita is for the usual raster art, while Inkscape is for precise vector art. Inkscape is what I used to create the perfectly-circular days-of-the-week platform with its smooth gradients. Sometimes I hear disdain towards artists who combine 2D illustrations with computer-y looking 3D background or the like, but as a silly little Zoomer influenced by modern media, I'm interested in the strange kind of effect it produces. The gradients for the circular platform I made are actually really simplistic, and I can't help but feel that it looks like it came out of some turn-of-the-century Medieval fantasy video game. Ig that's fitting, considering the game Patchouli comes from—"the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil"—came out in 2002.

Man, I am gushing so much with words 😓 I wonder if I'm trying to get all that rush of excitement out by saying and writing a lot a lot a lot 🤔 In any case, I'll wrap things up. As I figure out how I wanna work with this blog I've made from scratch, I'll probably not write too too much next time. I can finally lift the hold on drawing stuff that's been unbearable for these past few weeks, because now I can post everything to my blog first, and cross-post later, putting links to bring people to this eye-burning flashbang of a blog. And I'll likely spend some time retroactively-posting stuff that I originally posted on Instagram or Tumblr, since that's one of the many awesome features my blog has that social media doesn't, heheh 😈 and I'd like for this to be a consolidation of all the stuff I've worked on, something that can be examined by me or anyone in the future.

And...that's about it! For my first, inaugural post on this blog. Hope to make many, many more posts! 🙌🏼