Here’s my girl Lumina. You’ve seen this new drawing before, but she was very easy to put together since I loved drawing her back in the day and there was ample stuff to compare to.
She’s been around since ‘99 (the top left is my first drawing of her) and she’s been a consistent part of my original character adventures since then. The left side drawings are from 99-02. Lumina suffered from ‘I like Sailor Moon’ disease as much as literally everyone else I drew all that time ago in that they all looked mystical and flowy and beautiful and serene even if they weren’t serene and flowy characters. Her latest drawing is far closer to her kind of devious wacky nosy personality and I included the yellow outfit one because it was a rare closer lean toward what she was really like even back then.
Her concept was always that she was a dragon lady who did magic, and this has definitely stayed, though I think now it’s more emphasized than it used to be. Before, it was just kind of like and here’s a weird green elf lady (though the grinning picture gave her teeth she was due!), and now I’ve tried to give her some more integration of elements. The purple hair now has echoes on her extremities, she’s got some larger more lizard claw kind of hands. I put her back in something more resembling her original colors, the kind of pinkish beige-y whatever, but, you know, an option that wasn’t extremely fluffy snow queen. I imagine that kind of color is involved in her proper dragon shape somehow anyway, so she’d favor it in clothing.
It’s always really something taking all these very anime looking old characters who I have this long standing emotional attachment to and making them look Not Anime. In some cases, I have a clear image of what they should look like instead and what I makes comes out like, ‘Oh, there you are! <3′, but in others, it’s really hard for me to make something new that feels like the old character without the conventions of the anime and manga vibe. For some characters, it’s easy to dismiss as something I really dislike but for others the old look is like a fond old friend and it’s hard to reconcile it with the things I have happening now. A lot of what I’ve been doing with these is trying to preserve the feeling of the characters, because the emotional attachment and recognition in the characters is equally important to me as making them look nicer, or make more sense, or be more coherent, or whatever.
