Feature on: Ghost In The Shell, History & Hand Drawing
Colored pencil, Pigment ink, Alcohol marker on Ohuhu 55% Bamboo paper.
Ghost in the Shell
It was i think back around Christmas 2025 I started trying to draw the Major- Motoko Kusanagi.
She is a tribute to this man:
Masanori Ota (太田正典), who writes by the pen name Masamune Shirow (士郎 正宗), is a Sci-fi, Fantasy, Horror writer out of Osaka Japan University of Arts. He started making comics in 1982 and by 1989 his legacy was sealed with creation of Ghost in the Shell, which is actually called :Mobile Armored Riot Police in Japan and “攻殻機動隊”
攻殻機動隊
This was Masamune Shirow’s May 1989 First Edition Ghost in the Shell.
They have bought Motoko a long way since 1989.
She is due for a reboot,,,
I did a few of her, but this one has been my favorite- She is by far not finished,
And… Again always jumping to color probably too fast. What can I say? I see things in color. Plus with Ghost you get to do some cool Red & Purple.
When Motoko initially came out in the initial Ghost in the Shell comic, she initially had red eyes, later they changed that to a more purpley glowy thing.
They have done several remakes of this since the original anime in 1995, the comic goes back to May of 1989 though for a first release.
In March 2017, Scarlett Johansson got the lead role as Major Motoko Kusanagi who had become a iconic legacy character portrayed as a Japanese girl recruited into a shadow program to become- The Ghost in the Shell, in which her entire body was amputated and her brain placed in a pure cybernetic body.
The role sparked widespread debate some lashed out calling it erasure of Asian Culture. They also strayed off the original comic a bit and closed the ending scene with Scarlett finding her birth mother and confirming she was in fact Motoko.
I love Scarlett- Black Widow especially she nailed that one and so many others,
Ghost in the Shell still has a ton of possibilities for a reboot
She was built on a particular culture, look, style and image. Someone put A LOT of work into her as a project. I think that should be respected.
It was i think back around Christmas 2025 I started trying to draw the Major- Motoko Kusanagi.
I did a few of her, but this one has been my favorite- She is by far not finished,
I am however a new artist, and still in the confidence building phase, whereas I get them to a certain point I like how they look and begin to become afraid to mess them up. Still getting over it- On the plus side, it is indeed fun to go back later and random pick up and try to progress or finish a left-off piece.
(The Japanese Calligraphy translates to “Japanese Mobile Armored Police”. This is what they actually call Ghost in the Shell in Japan, it’s country of origin and is stamped on every one of their comic books.)
For asian calligraphy like this, I verify the script by multiple sources, I print it as seen, I then draw gridded boxes within a sheet of graph paper.
[I use a 1/3 rule dividing the boxes both horizontally and vertically by 1/3 and use those as placement grid to practice a hand sketch. After a few tries I usually get it down and can start looking at doing it on a live drawing I am working on.]
I still need to add this to the actual drawing, it will go on the bottom left corner vertically.
Lemme know what ya think. I’ve only been drawing about 18 months, I grew up on these style comics so it was almost kind of a default when i think of thinks to draw - Love my old throw back characters from my youth..
Ghost in the Shell of course too, was a friggin’ Legacy character!
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