Don't say goodbye when you leave on a mission.
It's just too sad.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is one of the greatest, most influential, and popular anime series out there right now. And here is one of the reasons why. Rei Ayanami, the mysterious Eva pilot.

Rei is what I like to call a perfect character design. She is indeed a physically attractive character, but there are other elements beyond that which make her visually appealing. I am sure that nothing about the way she looks is an accident. Aside from the obvious, that being of course her short hair and skin tight outfit, the colours that the original artists chose for her make her stand out from the crowd of anime babes. Her blue hair makes her look unique, the white outfit attracts the eye to her pose, the pale skin blends in well with the other muted, cool colours, and, most importantly, those red eyes make her look like there's just something different about her. Like I said, the perfect character design.

This painting was done on cold press Bristol board at around spring time of 2001 using watercolour paints and pencil crayons. Many official Eva paintings I've seen had an orange tint to them, so for mine, I used blue and purple to play off of Rei's usual cool colour palette. Doing this made her skin and eyes pop out from the background even more.

It's not 100% on model but I'm happy with it because I think I captured the essence of the character. What you are looking at here is a digital photo of the original board. This was also completed over the course of many weeks while being watched by my students. Hi kids!

Here's a close up.

Rei actually shares space on this board with another painting right beside her: Piccolo from Dragonball Z! Click on this picture of them both together to see him.

© Gainax

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