khylov

Merry Chimerasmas...


...Because I realized I had the Halloween post up until December.

That, and I wanted to post this for the folks who I couldn't email it to (i.e., those that I don't have an email address for. *cough* Steve! Hwang! Sah! *cough*...)

Anyhow, seasons' tidings and all that.

.............

"Arisaka gozaimasu!"

Had a good time the other day letting rip some bullets. Drove out to the middle of nowhere with the pops, found a good spot, and tested out the new toy: an Arisaka 99. (That's a WWII bit of weaponry from Hirohito's Imperial Army.)

Thing with Arisakas - many of them were decommissioned after the war, meaning that some were intentionally disabled by various authorities so that the rifle couldn't fire again. The way this was done - a little sawing into a nicely hidden area, in and near the breachblock/action. Thus, the end result is a time bomb if you try to fire it.

We had to do a test fire first: A parachute string on the trigger while standing 10 paces back, in case the thing remembered it's Bushido obligations and decided to blow up in our hands. But it worked great, and I have to admit: 'Twas fun to play Eastwood for half an hour on Christmas Weekend in the backwoods of a NorCal National Park.

............

Bambooty...

And in keeping with the Japanese theme: Some bamboo mats.

The first two are old news for some of you folks out there. These ones are 42 x 21 cm.


The work up sketches for the two.
I kind of wish I could've gotten the little action thumbnails into the painting. Maybe larger stand-alone's with those would be better.

And, needless to say, translating a drawing from sketch to bamboo accurately is something else that I'ma need to work on...

This last one was a test run on a larger canvas (19 x 13 in).

Some tangent issues with a couple of the characters overlapping one another, and some emphasis issues with color saturation and line weight. But is a good start, and I have plenty of blank mats to cut my teeth on til I get this right. (That's the nice thing about this kind of medium: It's cheap. Not necessarily easy, though...)