Parents!

2025.

On the sidelines of my personal work, I had been slowly adding to this BLAME! fan-work.

It initially started with the intent to have The Megastructure drawn with great detail in the background. However… knowing I had already done that before and with respect to my own health, I kept it a bit more simple.

I’m working on big things, piling another big and detailed thing on top of what I’m doing won’t help me.

You can actually see where I was going to separate the foreground from the background. The perspective line shows where things would’ve been.

Why did I keep the line? I just liked how it looked.

Line-less version below.

Nihei (BLAME!’s author/artist) draws with what I’ll call “interpretive designs”.

His characters often wear all black and are dropped into high contrast environments that have a lot of matching blacks.

There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s stylish and saves him having to draw every detail as the details are obscured.

For anyone wanting to make fan-work though, this means really having to give these characters your own spin. As their details are hard to figure out and sometimes just straight up change.

Cibo in the movie version is more outright cybernetic, I think I sort of captured that in my first and more painterly BLAME! work, when I went for a more ethereal tone.

In the manga it’s a bit more vague as to what about her is beyond human, her face is much less doll-like and she looks as much like she could just be wearing a tight suit as she does augmented.

I wanted to capture that aspect with Cibo quite a bit, so I used a mix of manga Cibo references and Evangelion plugsuit references to strike a vague blur. I’m quite happy with the results, as I think they could be read as either futuristic apparel or a cybernetic body.

Sanakan is pretty much a streamlined version of her manga design, it’s been cleaned up in a way that could be fit for something visually similar to the Oshii G.I.T.S films. At least, that’s how I want to think it looks. It is how I feel it looks as I type this.

The title and semi-intimidating/semi-intimate pose is a reference to events that take place in the latter half of the BLAME! manga.

The glowing silhouette line of the characters is inspired by Rei Hiroe’s use of a similar technique in the cover arts of Black Lagoon.