Some years ago, eight or nine, I think, I sat at the drawing table I shared with my sister, ready to do a poster that I would give as a present to my eldest cousin and his wife-to-be. I think I wanted it to be a wedding present. Anyway, I faced the DIN-A3 sheet and started creating a female character. On the left side her face appeared. Green eyes, chestnut hair, worn in bunches, slightly dark skin. On the right, a full body image, revealing her yellow dress, waist-tighten by a metal belt, a cloak, a pair of boots… She also wore some accessories: long hanging earrings, hair slides and a chain-hanging brooch on her forehead. Later on I realized that the mixture looked excessively ornate and coloured, so I simplified the character design in her next drawings.
So I had finished the poster and that was it. Or so I believed.
Some time after that, I started studying Spanish literature at school and we read a classic, Lazarillo de Tormes, by an anonymous author. The book tells the life of a boy during the 16th century and how he learns to survive in a society led by hypocrisy, selfishness and a false sense of honour by turning into a cynical and joining his contemporaries’ lifestyle. He’s a cunning person who takes care of himself above everything else. And I liked that. A non-idealistic character for a far-from-perfection world. A glimpse of the personality I wanted my recently created figure to have.
Besides, at that time I had watched several anime series and I felt a little upset about the average female characters personality. I’m not referring to all of them, of course; there are many interesting female characters in anime, like Faye Valentine in Cowboy Bebop, Hitomi Kanzaki, of Escaflowne, or Anshi Himemiya from Shōjo Kakumei Utena. But many of the productions one could see on TV (most of them shōjo, like Card Captor Sakura, Sailor Moon, Fushigi Yuugi…) displayed young females being sometimes exasperatingly sensitive, talkative, extrovert or cry-babies, while others just showed them as lustful women or sexily dressed just for the fun of it (generally shōnen: Saber Marionette, Ranma ½, Dirty Pair…).
I wanted to make her different from these types of gals, so she became a girl of few words, independent, discreet, and adopted a slyness similar to Lazaro’s.
She hadn't been given a name yet, so that was the following step. I looked up in the dictionary how to translate "pillo" or "pícaro", as Lázaro was often called, into English. Several nice-sounding terms turned up: crafty, cunning devil, slyboots... I was studying Japanese at that time and I had learnt the hiragana and katakana syllabaries and what rōmaji was (the transcription of Japanese words into the western alphabet), so I took "slyboots" and turned it into “suraibutsu”, which I think Japanese people would pronounce like /srai-buts/, dropping the final “u” and muffling the first one. Her name was to be Surai, and I left Butsu as an option for her surname.
There’s a mix I’ve made with some of the many drawings of Surai I’ve done until now.
The one on the top-left is the poster drawing, without colour. Not that I am a great draftswoman now, but it’s obvious that I was pretty worse then.
The following is an example of the original design and colouring, which I later changed. Down on the right side there’s one of my latest drawings of her, as it is the one on the opposite side of the page. The rest of the images are other costumes designs and attempts to draw her as a child.
And in the middle there’s the hiragana form of her name. Being a transcription from English, it should be written in katakana, but hiragana tends to look smoother so I left it this way.
1 comentarios:
Un largo camino comienza con un primer paso...ya diste muchos y me alegro cada día mas acompañándote hasta dónde pueda. Con toda la fuerza que te mereces: ¡adelante!. Que prosiga tu aventura, Surai. Besos, Zatoichi.