Sensei takes a plunge

last modified: Friday, November 20, 2009 (12:02:42 PM CST)

... and buys a cel from a series he's not collected from up to now.

Yes, yes, I've been very good about limiting myself to sketches only for Inuyasha. They are, after all, very high in quality, and doing a little research on the production teams always leads me in interesting directions. And as I've gotten a critical mass of material (my IY sketches now fill an entire Light Impressions archival box) I've begun to get a sense of individual artists' techniques and habits.

And even if some of this information is technical in nature, each batch has at least one knockout drawing, like this one of a mildly jealous Inuyasha snarling over his shoulder at Kagome, who's sticking up for the ancestor of one of her modern-day classmates.

http://sensei.rubberslug.com/gallery/inv_info.asp?ItemID=293207

But one of the highlights of my summer was obtaining a set of roughs showing Inuyasha getting ready to nuke a lowlife bank robber he meets in Kagome's world:

http://sensei.rubberslug.com/gallery/inv_info.asp?ItemID=284039

So what's a guy to do when the matching cel appears on Yahoo Japan and for a price (barely) within my retirement income "mad money"?

http://sensei.rubberslug.com/gallery/inv_info.asp?ItemID=293212

Happily, too, one of the other sketch sets helped confirm that the artist of the rough that started me down the dogbane path was probably Yoshihito Hishinuma, the overall animation supervisor of the Inuyasha TV series. So adding the cel to the sketch makes both more special (and happier).

There are other nice items in the update, fewer than before but still special in some way. A very pretty CCS cel shows her practically wrapped in the arms of a very eerie armchair that creepy Eriol invites her to sit in during a visit:

http://sensei.rubberslug.com/gallery/inv_info.asp?ItemID=293205

And since Kannon aka Kanzion aka Guan Yin, the Merciful Goddess, has been truly so kind to me in my own Journey West to animeland, it is a pleasure to add a lovely and detailed genga of her from the Saiyuki Gensomaden series:

http://sensei.rubberslug.com/gallery/inv_info.asp?ItemID=293204

Enjoy the look of the gallery for a few more days, which honors the final fall fling of Momiji, our Japanese maple in the front yard. Three days after this photo was taken, its miniature branches were all bare and the now-brown leaves were pillowing its roots to keep them warm during Cephiro's four months of winter. So too my gallery will shift soon to a less bright cold-weather look, though with touches of color for Christmas and New Years.