Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic × Vocaloid Fan Illustration

Swap the neon and cyan for a warm dusk palette to get a calmer, painterly sibling.

From the research on Vocaloid Fan Illustration (Hatsune Miku Culture)

Mix them and make something Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic Vocaloid Fan Illustration

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Vocaloid Fan Illustration, their arrangement from Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic, the finish from Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic Vocaloid Fan Illustration (Hatsune Miku Culture)

Type from Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic: Lowercase only
Colour from Vocaloid Fan Illustration: Limited spot colours
Analogous harmony
Form from Vocaloid Fan Illustration: Stylised figuration
Rounded & pill
Composition from Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic: Single focal point
Full bleed
Surface from Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic: Painterly brushwork

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic

Fiesta

Mochiy Pop One; Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic used Lowercase stream and track titles in plain sans text with a single emoji as the only ornament, as in Lofi Girl's 'lofi hip hop radio 📚 beats to relax/study to' and 'jazz lofi radio 🎷 beats to chill/study to' and Letter-spaced capitals in track and compilation titles ('RAINING IN P A R I S', 'L O V E S I C K'), which fans trace to vaporwave and to typing Latin words with Japanese keyboards and typefaces (Wang, 2020)

Text · Vocaloid Fan Illustration

A fan illustration culture around one licensed character, Hatsune Miku, whose turquoise twin tails and synthesizer-sleeve motifs are redrawn for songs, videos and covers. The design is CC BY-NC (per Wikipedia) and fan use runs under Crypton's Piapro Character License, so the character stays licensed property, with commercial use needing Crypton's permission; that openness invited the volume of fan work, while the recurring cyan, pink and interface motifs come from the character design. Unlike vtuber-graphics, an avatar for one streamer, it is a shared character many fans redraw.

Shippori Mincho; Vocaloid Fan Illustration used Rounded and geometric sans-serifs for song titles and Hand-lettered titles in fan cover art

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Vocaloid Fan Illustration, with a counter-accent from Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic Vocaloid Fan Illustration (Hatsune Miku Culture)

#0b1d3a ground · 36%
#ffffff ink · 14%
#ff6fa5 accent · 18%
#f2a65a accent · 14%
#39c5bb accent · 10%
#7a4e3a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #0b1d3a;
  --ink: #ffffff;
  --accent-1: #ff6fa5;
  --accent-2: #f2a65a;
  --accent-3: #39c5bb;
  --accent-4: #7a4e3a;
  --font-display: "Mochiy Pop One", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}

Use it with care

Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic: The study girl (Jade), the Synthwave Boy and Chillhop's raccoon are owned characters, and the genre's first face, a Studio Ghibli clip used without permission, cost ChilledCow its stream in 2017: draw an original figure, room and view instead of tracing Ghibli frames or the Lofi Girl scene. The combination that identifies Lofi Girl (a girl in headphones writing at a desk, a cat on the sill, Lyon's Croix-Rousse hill beyond) is the one to change first: swap at least the figure, the companion and the view. Lofi Girl makes all its art by hand and objects to AI-generated avatars that resemble or recreate its characters, so never generate a look-alike of Jade or her companions, and disclose generated pictures. Leave out Japanese text unless it is correct and means something, and do not dress a room in random kana or generic 'Japan' scenery.

The two styles

2017–present · Global / networked, Western Europe, North America, East Asia Lo-fi Anime Aesthetic The look of YouTube's 24/7 lo-fi hip hop streams. Early uploads looped found clips from cartoons and anime (The Simpsons, Whisper of the Heart); the look was fixed when ChilledCow (now Lofi Girl) swapped its Ghibli clip for Juan Pablo Machado's 'Miyazaki-esque' girl studying by a window over Lyon, art many channels copied. One absorbed figure, anime person or animal mascot, in a cosy painted room, a city or rain at dusk outside, cool blue-violet light warmed by a lamp, a few things moving in a seamless loop: a picture to work beside, sincere where vaporwave is ironic.

An anime-style girl with long turquoise twin ponytails looks upward in front of a large white moon and a dark city skyline. Flowing hair, pink and turquoise stars, and reflections on water surround her beneath a Japanese title.

2007–present · East Asia, Global / networked Vocaloid Fan Illustration (Hatsune Miku Culture) A fan illustration culture around one licensed character, Hatsune Miku, whose turquoise twin tails and synthesizer-sleeve motifs are redrawn for songs, videos and covers. The design is CC BY-NC (per Wikipedia) and fan use runs under Crypton's Piapro Character License, so the character stays licensed property, with commercial use needing Crypton's permission; that openness invited the volume of fan work, while the recurring cyan, pink and interface motifs come from the character design. Unlike vtuber-graphics, an avatar for one streamer, it is a shared character many fans redraw.