So I recently finished watching season 1 of Trigun Stampede, an anime released earlier this year based on Yasuhiro Nightow’s original Trigun manga series. This adaptation is meant to be a reimagining of the original story, but since I had never read the original series or seen the older anime adaptation, I had no idea what to expect going in.
I fell completely in love with it–the animation, the characters, the story, everything. If you’re not familiar with the show, here’s a quick overview, courtesy of Wikipedia:
In the far future, Earth has become uninhabitable, forcing humanity to evacuate in massive colony fleets to search for habitable planets. In order to sustain the fleets and the colonies they will eventually build, humanity also created plants, artificial organic lifeforms that can produce infinite, clean energy. In one colony fleet, two brothers named Vash and Nai are born with a special connection to plants and are cared for by a woman named Rem Saverem. However, the colony fleet’s computer systems suddenly malfunction, causing the entire fleet to crash land on the arid planet of Noman’s Land. Rem sacrifices herself to save Vash and Nai, but Vash is mortified to learn that Nai was responsible for the disaster, as he seeks to kill all humans for exploiting plants.
Many years later, the survivors of the colony fleet have built several cities on Noman’s Land’s surface, being totally dependent on plants to survive the hostile conditions. A now adult Vash wanders the desert aimlessly, having been branded a dangerous outlaw nicknamed “Vash the Stampede” or the “Humanoid Typhoon”, while Nai continues his schemes and has taken up the nickname “Millions Knives”. As Vash tries to find a way to peacefully resolve the differences between humans and plants, he runs into the investigative reporters Meryl Stryfe and Roberto De Niro, marking the starting point of a new adventure for the three of them.
Trigun Stampede, Wikipedia
Vash has quickly ascended into favorite anime character territory for me. Even after experiencing profound trauma, he remains steadfastly optimistic and insists on finding the good in everyone, no matter how far down the wrong path they’ve traveled. No matter how terribly he’s treated he refuses to devalue human life and tries to protect it at all costs. Considering the current state of the world, I think we could all learn a lot from Vash.
(Image credit: Studio Orange)
Fan Art Process
Shortly after watching the show I did some character studies of Vash in preparation of a fan art piece I had in mind.
I had in mind one of my favorite scenes where Vash interacts with a sick plant, healing it and in the process revealing his unique connection to the plant world. Here’s a progression from sketch to Vash’s finished design.
Once I was happy with Vash I started working on the rest of the scene. The hardest part here was adding in Vash’s super cool cybernetic hand–that thing took forever! For the plant I used an overlay filter and outlined it with a lightpen brush to get the glowing effect. Finally I added a blue layer set to around 20% opacity on overlay mode over the whole thing to add to the glowy atmosphere.
It was fun to challenge myself to come up with my own version of this scene, especially since a lot of the fan art I’ve done up till now has been studies of screenshots or existing art, I’ll definitely have to do more Trigun stuff soon!