I saw for the first time the anime film AKIRA on a VHS in the mid 90's, and became one of my favorites anime (and manga later) of all times.
When I was selected to join a collective art exhibit about anime, I decided to work on this title just to make my long waited tribute, but also having the hard task of converging anime style and my own cartoon style.
So, before sketching, I have to make a main character's list. At first, I view the film a couple of times, and then I read the 6 volume manga to get the whole picture of it, the characters, the background of my artwork, the elements on it.
Once I have all the characters I need, and not wanting to make a barroque artwork with a dozen of people in it, I decide to priorize. I reduce my list to 8 characters: Tetsuo Shima, the three psych kids and Kaneda must have in there. Coronel Shikishima and Kaneda's bike too. But also I have a dilemma: in the anime there's two complex characters left behind that have major roles in the manga: Lady Miyako and Akira itself. So I decided to represent Akira as the old tokyo explosion, and the three espers into the big milk-bleeding bear that appears on Tesuo's room. Some pills around them and the space station SOL 740 firing above them all. And that's it. I have image of the artwork I wanted in my head and then in a rough sketch.
Then I made the entire process as always: Scan the sketch, refine elements on illustrator only with mouse-click pen tool vectors and finally have a 50x70cm artwork ready to the art exhibit opening.
Here's the framed artwork at the opening night.
