I’ve done fanart for my favorite anime before, but I haven’t done anything really incredible, in my opinion. (I still don’t think this one is incredible, haha). Anyway, I wanted to spend a little more time on a work with the new Ghost in the Shell movie being released. While I don’t agree with the casting choice for the new movie, and I definitely had a different idea of where they should have gone with the legendary IP, I still enjoy the IP and original content.

Recently, Ghost in the Shell (1995) was put up on Hulu, and while enjoying it all over again, I was thinking about how different the stylization of Motoko Kusanagi was from the first movie to the second movie and even to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. For example, in Ghost in the Shell (1995) the Major has ice blue eyes and more black hair than purple. In Stand Alone Complex, she’s got purple hair and red/orange eyes (which we can assume might be from changing bodies, if we want to consider continuity). The Major in Ghost in the Shell: Arise goes back to blue eyes, but has more bluish-purple hair. Differences. So I thought to myself, how do I see Motoko Kusanagi in my style?

I also had this idea. I was playing with golden ratio beauty masks, which is a supposedly mathematically proven formula for the most beautiful faces. It’s something you can overlay onto a photo to see if features fall within the predetermined “beauty” standard. Symmetry is a big part of this, along with placement. I pasted one over one of my digital portraits out of curiosity, and then came up with this idea that what if I overlaid the actual structure of the android body that laid beneath? Kind of like a reveal.

I was also at this point trying to work out a way to make it more than just a static portrait with nothing interesting to it. I thought of the idea of water, because the Major likes to swim/dive despite the fact that she operates a heavy cyborg body and could easily sink (and never be recovered), which is something Batou berates her about in the 1995 animated film. Then I also remembered certain scenes during Stand Alone Complex where they give it a sort of “fish eye lens” while she’s connected to the net or “diving” in the net, which looked a little bit like mine. So I ran with it and decided to do a bit of a water as well as a glitch animation to make things real interesting.