A few of my early work in progress photos of an original version of Satoru Asahina from the anime From the New World.
Oh gosh I am much further along on this project now, but to catch this page up let’s start at the beginning instead of in the middle of my process. This started off as as simple school uniform project, but because I love this show so much, I redesigned it to both make it a bit more interesting and I also to try to translate the style of the show to real life a bit better.
While extremely direct recreations of costumes can be wonderful, I find that especially with anime, they don’t always capture the feelings in real life that they evoke as they do when animated. And this is mostly because when translated to a much larger scale, they lack a lot of detail and design choices. For example most fabrics in anime are just solid blocks of color with minimal highlights and shading. They lack a lot of defining traits including the the thing every real world fabric has—some sort of texture. So I try to provide those details and choices with as much respect to the source material as possible. Full disclosure, for this project I changed up a few larger things as well, but for the same reasons.
This project Is an odd one because the show is set “one thousand years form now” in a unique take on what the world could be. To conjure the feels of the society in the show, I’ve been combining traditional embroidery and silhouettes with a more futuristic take on the pattern drafting and overall construction. I’m excited to see how well my decisions translate in the end!