Inuyasha & Kagome

One piece of art I really wanted to have for Sakura Con this year was a new piece of Inuyasha/Kagome fan art. Over my early years as a fan artist I did several Kagome and Inuyasha pieces but I never felt like I did their characters or relationship real justice in my work.

Some examples of what I'm talking about:

I put a lot of thought into what I wanted to do with these characters now.

I decided to create a piece based on very popular images of Inuyasha - but re-imagined my own way. Basically two images/visuals inspired this new piece:

One, there's a popular official image of Inuyasha (I should probably mention here that he's the dog-eared one, in case you have no idea who in the drawing I'm talking about) that shows him with his hand extended. It's great because it looks like he's welcoming you in and the whole series is about joining him on his adventures in Japan's past. But it's also a very out of character image of him - his nature was more to fight or to ignore, not to welcome.

Two, I've always like how it looks when Inuyasha and Kagome are posed standing back-to-back.

I combined these two images/ideas and put my own unique spin on them for this piece. The driving idea behind my drawing was that I wanted to incorporate the popular visual of the extended hand, but as Kagome's hand instead - she was always the welcoming one and reaching her hand out with a smile is completely in character. For some reason, I also really wanted to draw Inuyasha eating his favorite food, instant ramen. In this drawing it worked, since I wanted to convey the "oblivious" aspect of his character (and giving him a surprised and a bit clueless expression with ramen hanging out of his mouth definitely conveys that).

I took some in-progress photos as I drew, so I was able to put together a rough slide show of its progression :

The biggest changes are always made in the step after I scan the pencil drawing and correct on the computer all the proportional issues I wasn't able to quite get right on paper. I think in this progression you can really see that.

Here's a static copy of the final piece:

While I definitely used references for parts of this drawing (and, as I said, was inspired by several very popular Inuyasha official images), a surprising amount of this piece was drawn straight out of my head. I'm really happy with how it turned out.

I think I captured the spirit of these two characters in a way that will speak to fellow fans - at least, it speaks to my own fluttering fan girl heart ;-)

~m.d.

Inuyasha, Kagome © Viz Media

(update 11/29 - I played with this piece a LOT over the year since I first drew it, trying to get it to feel just right to me. . . this is the result that I'm sticking with for now and calling "final"):