Anyone know where this particular image is from (the physical source material)? Have been looking around ever since I saw this image and have had no luck in finding the matching poster/phone card/or misc merchandise that has this image. Am primarily interested so I can aquire it myself and get a better scan of it.

No idea, but now I want the source too.

I dunno. Everything except her head doesn't seem to be Gotoh's style. Did somebody trace from an existing image perhaps?

I always thought that pic was a shop, ruri's head just seems out of place.

I agree that the head in this particular image does seem a bit out of place relative to the rest of the image, its a mixture of both Gotoh's cel painting style (head) and his sketch (prisma marker) style on the body; also blended into a 3D picture that's been blur'd and otherwise to fit into the picture.

Even for the head though, have had no luck in finding that particular image, there's a close one that's used on a rare puzzle: http://page10.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/m58328084 but haven't seen any images that would fit no matter how much you edited it. The hair looks like its done with a (real) paintbrush and the rest of the body done by markers. Even if that is so, the author did a really decent job of merging the two (or however many) images together. If they could've textured the head coloring to look more like markers and done something about the right hand it could pretty easily pass for something by Gotoh.

Even so, I still like the image and fits perfectly as wallpaper for desktop.