Kuri throughout the years

As many of you may know, I have an original character that has been with me since the 7th grade. At this point, I might as well consider her a persona. If you scroll on my page for a bit, you may notice this girl with pink hair and blue eyes floating around all the time. Honestly, she didn’t have a name for the longest time but eventually, I decided on Kuri. How did we get there? No clue, but that’s her name now. 

The earliest rendition of Kuri that I had was probably in the 7th grade when I decided to draw my old My Little Pony character as a human. I decided I didn’t like Rainbow Lily’s (the MLP OC) eye color since it was too close to her hair color so I changed it to blue. I did try to keep some of the character’s design with the 2 pigtails and the ball hair ties. 

Initially, she would just be a character that would probably be tossed in the forgotten pile like many others I have created. Somehow, I found myself sketching her more and more often until eventually, I decided to give her a name. 

For a while I kept drawing her with the bright pink hair and pigtails until one day I went “That is too bright and disturbing” so eventually I toned down the color to a light pink color. I wanted to keep the pigtails at the time so as to not make too drastic of a change in the character design. Eventually, I ended up with this:

If I was being completely honest, I have no idea why I kept drawing her with cat (?) ears. I think it was a “this makes her character more unique” type of thing rather than an “I am a furry” type of thing. Either way, I stuck with this design for a little while before I inevitably cut my hair near the end of the 7th grade. It was around this time that I decided that Kuri would just grow with me rather than be a separate entity.

For a really long time, I kept her design like this, with pink hair with half pigtails and blue eyes. I would also make her clothes have purple in them one way or another. This was basically the longest design of Kuri I had. 

I believe that this one stayed with me for about 2 or 3 years before I decided to change it a bit again. Throughout the years, I have made minor tweaks to her design like I have tried tying her hair in a different style or letting it all down a few times. I didn’t like those so I just stuck with this design instead. The good thing was that all of these drawings of the same character helped me see my own art progress throughout the years. 

The next major change in her design was when I started having an obsession with potentially dying my hair. I decided that it only made sense to color her hair blue as a potential “hair dye” color. I didn’t want to completely change her hair because the pink was honestly iconic and I would just feel weird making it another color. 

At this stage, I decided to also try making Kuri’s hair different lengths. As you can see in the image, she has both long and short hair. The shorter hair is what I imagine her hair length to be if I took out the pigtails while the longer ones were more just for fun. 

I also noticed that I frequently put Kuri in clothes that I would want to wear or styles that I liked at the moment. For example, the image above has Kuri wearing decora fashion (or at least I tried) and the other image is of her in my Halloween costume. Basically, I was playing “matching outfits” with my character sometimes because I thought it was cute.

Over the past 2 years, I haven’t drawn her as much as I had hoped however I do like seeing the improvement of both her character design and also my artistic ability. My most recent drawing was the image on the right, I honestly just missed drawing her so that was the result. As you can see, my most drastic change was definitely in the past 2 years since I switched to Procreate. Her character doesn’t give off that cute anime-like vibe anymore. Maybe I will draw her again with an older character design but we will see.

Honestly, looking back at my old art is always very interesting and I find that seeing my character grow and evolve alongside me has been one of the most fun parts of my artistic journey. Hopefully, I will draw her again soon, and not once a year!