I started this piece as a sketch while viewing a panel at Libreplanet 2024, which I attended with some friends and had a lovely time at. It took me a good while to actually finish, mainly being worked on during my summer class.
I tend to do a lot of drawing on my tablet (Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra) as a way to deal with my ADHD- when listening to a presentation or lecture that I don't necessarily have to look at, engaging with art can prevent me from getting distracted, allowing me to better pay attention. It also has a secondary effect of working sort of like note taking- I'll associate different parts of the process of making a piece with whatever I was listening to at the time. It may seem counterintuitive, but bear in mind that it doesn't work with, say, reading, because then I'm trying to juggle two forms of language stimuli. It works best if I'm engaging in a different medium to what I'm trying to pay attention to. In this regard, art works well because my pieces seldom contain much in the way of text.
As for why it's called "Nerd Emoji", it literally just comes from this skeet on bluesky about a generic picori from Minish Cap's concept art. I haven't named this guy because he could honestly stand in for any masc forest picori. The only identifying thing that ties this picture to the concept art is the blue kinstone shard, which I depicted him being in the middle of going off to hide for someone to hide. By the way, check this out: before I did shading, I kept a copy of the subject as just flats because I thought it looked neat.
Since Nintendo clearly has no intention of doing anything with Minish Cap ever again, maybe I should make my own picori lore zine...