Video: Why did the artist Ayami Kojima create the "vampire aesthetics", and what came of it
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Ominous corridors, eerie castles, skeletons and split skulls, and among them - he: with a bouquet of roses, porcelain leather and golden curls. But do not delude yourself - these tender lips hide sharp fangs … These are the characters of the artist Ayami Kojima, who changed the Japanese idea of vampires. Worldwide fame was brought to her by the design of characters and art for the Castlevania series of games.
Ayami Kojima is a brilliant self-taught artist. She began working as a secretary, but to entertain herself and escape from the routine, she began to paint … and developed her own style and technique. Her love for manga and horror films became the starting points in her creative development.
The artist's style balances between surrealism and a modern interpretation of the baroque. Angel-like youths grip bloody swords, crippled golden-haired angels cry with bloody tears, scales, feathers, skeletons and roses flash in front of the viewer, pulling him into the exquisite world of nightmares.
Ayami works exclusively by hand, sketching with a simple pencil, then creates shadows with ink, and then finalizes the image with acrylic paints, highly diluted with water - this allows you to apply thinner layers and achieve the most delicate color gradations. In her arsenal - modeling paste, a palette knife, shading sticks, a rough brush and her own fingers. After completing the work, Ayami adds paint with a metallic sheen and paints the image with polymer varnish. The technology seems unreasonably complex, but it gives amazing results.
For some time she worked as an independent illustrator, designing Japanese novels, and was known only to a narrow category of connoisseurs within the country. However, one of the producers of the popular Castlevania series of computer games, Koji Igarashi, one day decided to change the design of the game's characters. He was not satisfied that in this mysterious world, inhabited by vampires and other incredible creatures, the main character appears as a stern macho, rude and manly.
The main characters of various parts of the game series were almost impossible to distinguish from each other, they were confused even by the creators themselves, calling them all, with a variety of biographies and storylines, the same - just "Simon". Despite the complex plot and interesting decisions, the games were too primitive from a visual point of view. In addition, the company decided to expand its target audience and attract more female players. The company's management rightly believed that women would want to see a more aesthetic picture and heroes corresponding to the Asian ideal of beauty - subtle, delicate, graceful and at the same time dangerous. Igarashi wanted to fill the game with a special vampire aesthetics, blood and darkness, not sweat and muscle.
Thinking about this, Igarashi went to the nearest bookstore. There, he scanned book after book, looking for an illustration that would reflect his intention, until he came across Kojima's cover. He selected a few more books with illustrations by other authors, but the whole team clearly recognized Ayami's work as perfect, ideally suited to the new course of the game.
When Igarashi managed to contact Ayami, she could not even understand who he was and what he wanted, and he could not even imagine that a young artist could be so far from the gaming industry! But games never interested her. In the recent past, she designed the cover for another game, but in her interviews she could not even remember its name (it was the game Soldner's Child - a strategy game on the Sega Saturn from KOEI). But soon the work on the world of Katslvania took over her head.
Igarashi did not limit Ayami in anything, relying only on her talent and his own intuition. He briefly explained the plot and the role of the character to her, and then asked her to do a few sketches that convey her feelings. Kojima claims that the producers never went into details and did not explain what influences their choice of a particular design.
Often Ayami's characters appear as blond or albino, sometimes fiery red - simply because it "looks better in the game", makes the heroes surreal.
Designing costumes, Kojima creates a true cocktail of modern Japanese street fashion and medieval clothing. True, the need to animate characters in three-dimensional graphics is very limiting for Ayami - she is drawn to complex constructive solutions, but the animators are protesting.
Ayami calls the mysterious Count Dracula her favorite character in Castlevania - she likes the images that breathe antiquity, she likes the opportunity to express life experience through looks and costumes.
But she does not like drawing very young creatures, especially little girls - it is too difficult to give their appearance an individuality, a kind of history, to keep on the verge between innocence and demonism, without repeating already existing images and not following established cliches.
In interviews with Ayami Kojima, she repeatedly said that she would like to see her characters in an anime or film, and reflected that it would be interesting to include characters with a different skin color - she is mesmerized by the protagonist of the movie "Blade". Not so long ago, one of the parts of the Castlevania game was filmed in the United States, where Isaac is from Africa (in the game he is a red-haired and white-skinned young man).
Ayami watches with joy and surprise as her characters take on a new life - in 3D games or … in reality! One day she went to a comic shop (Ayami is a big fan of the senen genre, deep themes and serious stories) and met several guys in strange costumes. "I've already seen them somewhere!" thought Kojima. She began to go over images from manga and anime in her mind … and then realized that the young men were dressed up as Castlevania characters, which she invented! The "animation" of the characters makes her feel awe and pride, and the real reward for all the work, creative agony and arguments with the producers is the popularity of the game with its design.
Now Ayami Kojima has a huge fan base all over the world. Many seek to imitate her unique style, find inspiration in her work, and seek to acquire art books with her drawings. Ayami herself has completed work on Castlevania, but continues to design other vampire games.
Continuing the theme of vampires, we have collected 20 little-known facts about Vlad Tepes, known as the bloodthirsty Count Dracula
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