Marcel Winatschek

The Lines I Could Never Get Right

When I was small, I spent years trying to draw Sailor Moon. Not just Usagi—the whole cast. The eyes always came out too big, the fingers too long, the legs bent at angles no leg should bend. I have no idea how much paper I wasted. After two or three years of no visible improvement, I quietly put the pencils down.

I wonder sometimes whether Karina Yashagina hit a similar wall at some point and simply kept going. Stubbornness, or hope, or just being better at this from the start than I ever was. Her illustrations are the kind you look at and feel a small, clean envy—not the bitter kind, the kind that makes you want to try harder.

Karina is based in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan in the southwestern part of Russia—a city that looks nothing like her work, which is warm and luminous and full of prettily rendered girls, cats, and vegetables. Her Behance portfolio is where most of it lives. My Sailor Moon drawings, meanwhile, are in a landfill somewhere. Good riddance.