Tenoh Haruka (天王 はるか
By Feureau on feureau.com

I have a LOT to say about Tenoh Haruka. ^^

In this particular piece, I give her a really broad shoulder to really points out her manliness. She's almost looking like a male if you don't know that her eyes are standard anime female. Or already know her character. I love how the outlines turned out on her hair. Such beautiful golden hair. And I did not put those specular highlights on her eyes except the large specular pupils that is the staple of Sailor Moon eyes. People just don't draw anime eyes with a large specular whites in the middle of the eyes. Many of the eyes in today's anime drawings don't seem to have that specular spark anymore. I think having them made the character cheery and happy. But Haruka's only outwardly happy. If there's a character who got problem expressing her true emotions, this is it. The absence of the specular highlights on her eyes made her personality seems ... deeper than what you would see in her smile. There's more to her than meets the eye.

I also give her a bit of a hunched back. Her suit reminds me of Qui-Gon Jinn's portrayal of Oskar Schindler in Schindler's List. Okay, the actor's name is Liam Neeson and he emanates the aura of superiority and mastery of a multitude of skills. And this is I think a staple of Haruka. I mean, he's set to play Abraham Lincoln in a Steven Spielberg movie about Lincoln, and further more Liam Neeson taught BOTH Batman AND Obi-Wan!! LOL So, OMG! Yeah, it's only natural that the character of Liam Neeson pops out into my mind when I thought about this. And Liam has that kind of a hunched back which makes him seems taller and grander than he looks to be. So there it is. ^^ If I were to design Haruka's character I'd make her, like, 6ft4. And given Liam's biography, I think it's rightly so. (a forklift operator for Guinness, truck driver, assistant architect and an amateur boxer before going into theater and the movies!! WOW!)

That being said, everything on the suit was made subtle. I want you to focus your eyes on her face and that's it. It's hard enough that the suit was Mugen Gakuen standard issue red suit, she had to wear a greenish Michiru Power Tie. ^^

Except that her talisman sucked. In many of Naoko's artwork she's usually depicted with a sword, but in final storyline, her talisman is a sort of this puny dagger thingy called the Space Sword which... sounded something out of Futurama. Yuck (yuck for the "sword" not Futurama, that one was cool). It's got emerald though on it though. This is just a guess but it seems that a sword is long and big while a puny dagger is small, which would mean that it would fit into closeup drawings while the sword would stick out and require at least a body shot.

Above all else, let me say that she's my favorite character on the entire series. Disappointingly, I must say she's also most underutilized.

There is a back story I once read about Haruka that seems to be lost in today's wiki world. I think it was on one of them Sailor Moon artbooks. I have to check. It said that Haruka's father always wanted a baby boy, and when she pops out, he was quite disappointed. This in effect causes Haruka to want to satisfy her father's wishes. So, she started dressing up like a boy and do all the boy stuff. She started riding bikes and do a lot of sporty things. Like boys do. But her father never accepted that and he never got around to get another child. I think it's because Haruka's mother died at labor, too, so her father kinda blamed her for that too.

It always stuck with me that her favourite food is Salad, and her favourite color is gold. Which, both, incidentally, are my favourites too. ^^

Although Haruka and Michiru are definitely lesbians, I never saw them as Yuris, and I don't think Naoko Takeuchi has viewed them as such either. Tenoh Haruka and Kaioh Michiru is definitely the epitome of Universal Femininity. Their love is pure and they represent girl power to the utmost pinnacle. A good interview with Naoko Takeuchi mostly about Haruka and Michiru in Sailor Moon.

After reading all that, wouldn't you say that she's really underutilized in the series? Haruka & Michiru would usually appear when the girls are almost beaten, and they'd kick the hell out of the bad guys and they'd go, "Now, Usagi! Use your power!!" And she'd blast the enemy to smithereens. ^^ Well, that's sentai for ya, but Haruka is like so full of unexplored material and the pair is actually a counterpoint to the Guardian Senshi.
They're like the angst-filled Batman to the cheery attitude of hopefulness of the Sailor Moon Superman.

Batman : Superman = Outer Senshi : Guardian Senshi (Plus Sailor Moon)

I don't think I need to say anymore about the American Crapdaptation name change. Amara is sooo not her.

And now, for something completely different, the technical bit, a kinda behind the scene look:
I keep it to be a habit to never save on top of an existing file. Just in case the app crash during saving. I know this does not happen anymore with photoshop cs3 especially on a mac. But I have experienced such occurrence on other software (made by less reputable corporations >> I'm lookin' at you, M$) on my mac, so just to be safe. I removed my office for mac 2008 trial. In relation to this particular piece, as I continued to save iteratively, that is, by adding an incremental number on the file name, I find that my hard drive space is dwindling linearly at an alarming rate. I was shocked! This could not have happened on a mac as it happened on my PC before! So, I immediately check that darwine did not somehow caught an executable worm or something. It did not. A quick look at finder denotes that there's a TON of large files on my hard drive. It was the incremental save. Each sizing up between 225 mb to 270 mb in size. The size increases almost linearly with each successive saves. Which means my hard drive actually fills out almost exponentially. Many Bothans died during this hard drive crush. In the end I saved 25 times iteratively. Plus the original file, that means 26 files of almost 300mb (estimated average) in size. 26x300mb = a little above 7.5 GB or almost two DVD's worth of Tenoh Haruka!! The final piece was a little above 315 MB of PSD file!!!

OMG that's a long one. I could write an entire book about Haruka. ^^ I promise I wouldn't make such a fuss on my future entries. This one's just special.



/Meh. I'll just do a doujinshi on the two someday.



I'm definitely not satisfied with that background color. And I can't put gold in there because it would take away the focus off of her face because her suite is reddish.
An art can never be finished. Finish an art, and you killed its soul.