Curse of the EVA

When you're stuck in quarantine after being fired from your job, no reason to leave your home, and embattled with the usual stresses of schoolwork, you tend to get a little inside your own head. For me personally, I try and distract myself with shows and documentaries so that I don't go crazy in the silence.

The Japanese anime show, Neon Genesis Evangelion, has endlessly spurred and inspired me to create during this time, despite in itself being incredibly depressing and despondent in nature. And to little surprise, I realized that so much of my work in this short has been directed by the aesthetics of this show, namely both of my original reaper design, pitched much earlier and put on the backburner. But recent developments and the necessity for more background characters has brought one my old favorite designs of mine to the surface, the reaper named Armisael.

Below is my most recent quick digital sketch of the character; a reaper designed after "angels" from jewish mythology, stuff of the torah, kabbalah, etc. The aforementioned NGE incorporates so much of that mythos into the show, I couldn't help myself in making a very angel like reaper. After all, the term "angel" is used very loosely in in the religion itself, so I thought "why not!" when making this reaper overly angelic.

And below are a couple of the images that helped inspire this characters creation. These two images were the biggest inspirations; I loved the look of the wings and cascading eyes.

(NOTE: None of the below images are mine!)

And finally, the imagery of Unit-00 from the aforementioned anime gave me the idea to create the angel with a single, staring eye. (below, not my art!)

How much will NGE influence my everyday life? Stay tuned.