A Rose from the Rosen Planet

Now that the Urusei Yatsura fanzine has been released at @uruseiyatsurazine​ , I can upload this! For many years, I always thought that Elle from the first movie UY: Only You deserved a little bit more notice among movie mentions. In fact, the first movie needs it -- Beautiful Dreamer is an obvious masterpiece while movies 3-5 are good in their own way imo. Only You tends to be forgotten about as I see it. along with movie 6, and to me, participating in this wonderful zine was a way for me to give the movie and Elle the spotlight ^__^

I also wanted to depict her because ever since I watched the movie, all of her scenes have stuck in my head. The good, the bad and that memorable scene where she’s in Royal Leader mode, then the next minute where she shows how vulnerable and sensitive and hurt she was. I can safely say her scenes were some of the first formative ones that made me realize how important depiction of expression and character are in animated/static medium. And I was only, like, 6 years old! That's why this movie is important to me.

Now as to how I made this THING XD I originally painted this in watercolor, with shadows in copics and Spectrum Noirs while the background were color inks. Unfortunately, my scanner ate so much of my colors that Elle's skin and the blues on the roses became non-existent! So after tinkering with the vibrance and levels, uh, levels, I decided to truly be a masochist and "repaint" all of this again. By that, I mean that I created a layer where I filled in all the respective colors (red, peach and white for Elle, blue for the rose, etc.), then I duplicated the layers and played with them to the point where the base traditional colors came out again. This is a tad similar to the method I used for my webcomic's Ch.2 print cover  but that one was more for shadows.

I love how this one turned out though, because it looks so dreamy! With soft colors and a soft mood, which fits one or two of Elle's movie scenes -- and ended up being similar to Akemi Takada's dream-like works XD I'm really proud of this finished product and I hope you like it too. Please check out all the other artists in the fanzine as well! There are some FANTASTIC pieces in there <3

I chose the traditional category on here because that's the original medium but this is really mixed media given the digital adjustments.

Elle (C) Rumiko Takahashi
Art (C)

Brushes used at the top from --> kabocha.deviantart.com/gallery…
Quick second EDIT: Forgot to say that adult Elle's pose is referenced from multiple Google photo searches of people sitting on bean bags