Yesterday, I rewatched Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Rebellion. Actually, I watched it twice: first by myself, and then a half hour later with my dad. There are so many hidden details in that movie, and I know I still haven't found them all. I felt inspired to make an illustration based off the movie, or perhaps the series in general.
For those who don't know, Puella Magi Madoka Magica is a one-season anime series that twists the "magical girl" trope into a dark and complex tragedy. (Rebellion is the movie-length sequel.)
The symbolism and the "making of" are under the cut.
(Beginning of spoilers for Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Rebellion)
The words are Japanese. They make the final line of the ending song of Rebellion: 何処にも行かないで。It translates as "Don't go anywhere." The girl with the black hair, Homura, has been driven to insanity by failing to save the pink girl's life (Madoka) over and over again. Time and again, she has "reset" time so she can try again, but to no avail. Eventually, she becomes so focused on her wish to "save" Madoka and be with her that she completely disregards Madoka's actual desires. She traps Madoka in a sort of rewritten reality where Homura thinks she can finally be "safe".
(End of spoilers)
Now for the process of making it:
I started by marking out a wide margin on a regular 8 1/2" by 11" piece of printer paper. Then I counted the Japanese letters (characters) and decided on where to put them.
Japanese characters always fit into an imaginary square box - unlike our Roman alphabet, where the height and width of different letters vary quite a bit. Since the characters are all the same size, this made it easier to plan out where they should go.
I drew 7/8" squares for the first half of the phrase and 1" squares for the second half. First, though, I added a tiny 1/8" margin all around the inside of the rectangle so that the letters wouldn't bump up against the edge of the drawing. I also added margins between the letters to let them breathe a little.
After looking at some Japanese calligraphy on the internet, I sketched out the characters and messed with them until I was satisfied. Then it was time to sketch out the two girls:
Then came the hard part: drawing decent-looking people who looked reasonably like their anime counterparts. This involved looking at a lot of official art. To be honest, I still wasn't completely accurate with Homura's outfit, but it's good enough. (The hands, on the other hand...)
And then, oy, it was time to color them. I'd have preferred to use markers, but I didn't have any that would pass for the girls' skin color. (The two closest shades were a dark brown and a spectacular sunburned pink.) So, I turned to colored pencils.
That's when I found out the hard way that my pencil eraser works on colored pencils, too! I usually do a sketch with a regular number 2 pencil, color over the top, and erase the original pencil marks. That was a lot trickier when I kept erasing the parts I wanted to keep, ha ha.
Even so, I was eventually satisfied.
Then, I outlined the letters in dark blue:
After that, I filled in the letters with yellow, outlined the whole rectangle, and made a background "filling" loosely based on some of the ones I've seen in medieval manuscripts & crewel embroidery.
It still needed some kind of border to draw it all together, so I made a blue one with yellow squares to match the Japanese. I was pretty tired by this point, so I just freehanded the diamonds instead of using a ruler.
I'd originally envisioned it as stars in the night sky, but the whole picture is so light that the effect might be lost. That's okay, though. I'm still satisfied with this drawing.
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