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Submitted on
July 10, 2009
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6 (who?)
Nightow Proportion Study by bink1227 Nightow Proportion Study by bink1227
This seems to be the basic shape of Nightow's male characters: slim waist, long legs, long arms. The first one is "mortal" proportions, eight heads tall. The second one is "hero" height, nine heads, but if you take a look and compare the two, the extra head height is not distributed equally along the entire figure. The arms are the same length as the mortal proportions, but the legs are much much longer.

I am pretty sure sometimes Nightow draws his characters almost 10 heads tall... Every once in a while in the manga, Nightow will illustrate a kind of idealized version of Vash, like, the mythical version. One of those pictures has IMPOSSIBLY LONG LEGS. (Still looks cool, though...)

edit: FOUND IT. [link]

There's no doubt about it, folks. The extra height is in the legs. Even the character design for Vash on the anime is crazy disproportionate. If you look at the model sheet for the anime, you can see that out of 9 heads, 5 of them are LEG. If you compare this to the mortal proportions, it's only 4 heads tall. If you look at NORMAL hero proportions, the legs are still only 4.5 heads tall.

Vash character design probably belongs to either Yasuhiro Nightow or Madhouse Studio.
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I love these proportions. I'm creating gods and I'm going for the statuesque look also. :-)

My only problem is that I want my characters to have more muscle. But when I add muscle it's as if they lose height but If I keep the height the don't seem as muscular. :-(

Still a great reference though. Love it.
Hey, I don't know if you're still working on this project, but you might want to check out basketball players. They're tall, but muscular. They have longer muscles rather than bulky ones. Bulk is going to take away from height if there's no reference. If there is a reference, however, you might be able to get away with it.
Good idea. Thanx. :D
Lol it cracks me up reading this somehow.
Haha, Vash's 'leggyness' warrants a fanfic of its own! Great sense of observation, Bink, I think your work shows great promise!

Tea Merchant xxx
Hey there!

It's not just Vash who is hopelessly disproportionate. The whole cast is like that. Maybe it's a Lamarckian adaptation due to space travel... Maybe... :)
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