Inuyasha OC -Sayo

This is Sayo, one of my (horror of horrors) original characters from an Inuyasha fanfic I've been working on for God knows how long, which will hopefully see the light of day before the end of this decade. Until I started on this story I was very reluctant to use OCs as anything other than minor/background characters in my fanfiction because there's so many pitfalls to avoid when it comes to OCs. However, in this story there was no way I could make a canon character the antagonist without making things *incredibly* contrived and I needed a cast of supporting characters who weren't just there to act as plot devices. None of them are romantically involved with any canon characters (except for a couple of one-sided crushes), so hopefully that'll get me out of Mary-Sue Hell for the time being. j/k

I have a very visual imagination, so I find coming up with designs for my original characters makes them easier to write. Sayo's actually a minor character but her design was one of the first ones I came up with, so she got drawn first. Anyhow,  she's a shinobi (ninja), of sorts. She comes from a samurai family who have turned to banditry after falling on hard times. Being a shinobi, she favours small, concealable weapons and guerrilla tactics over hand-to-hand combat but she's pretty good with a naginata when she needs to be.

I know shinobi usually wear regular clothes but I wanted to draw her in her night suit so I could get the design down. Yes, her clothes aren't black; pure black sticks out like a sore thumb at night so traditional shinobi night suits were usally dark blue, red or green instead. Despite my evil scanner eating my colouring, I quite like how she turned out but I think I'll replace the dark purple on her sash and hairnet with dark blue or pinkish-purple if I draw her in this outfit again. Also, I should have made her tabi the same colour as her night suit in the first place. ><

The pose was borrowed from page 88 of Jeff Johnson's Draw Fight Scenes Like a Pro (it's as cheesy as it sounds but it's also an extremely useful art book).

Sayo belongs to me, Inuyasha belongs to Takahashi Rumiko, Viz, Shogakukan and anyone else who's making actual money out of this (i.e. not me).