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...)

-Character moments, plus more Kikuchiyo -

































Second pass on the drunk take. No reference for Kikuchiyo this time. (And maybe it shows for the worse? Eh....)

Animation paper, Colerase, Micron pens. Yosh^2.

"Shichinin no samurai"












It's been a few years since I last saw Seven Samurai. I had plenty of reference material to look over (Thank you, Google). I did a couple of sketches before any of the ones posted here, based straight off of DVD covers and film images. Felt kind of cheesy with that though, so....

Here's a prelim page. Kikuchiyo's character was the first one I started in on, and the toughest for me to do through the course of this whole thing. Design is one thing, but design that has to resemble someone... Aiyah....








Probably one of the most memorable parts for me was Kikuchiyo stumbling drunk. I tried getting a hint of that here; and in theory, drawing a character inebriated and about to puke on himself sounds like a nice warm up to keep the character design from becoming too stiff..... Turned out to be alot harder than I gave it credit for. I was going by memory and improv on this one. Still needs work:

















It was fun to finally try to render a character that has been, I think, the archetype for all latter devil-may-care ronin-types in samurai films and (do I say it? Do I?!..) anime films.




















Mifune got it spot on, a really brash, careless fool who's just as much a warrior as he is a bully... but very skilled, very likable and (this may be the reason for why he has the appeal that he does) very vulnerable.

Several times in the film, he's either laughed at, put in his place, or finds himself in the middle of some sort of crisis/internal conflict that he doesn't solve right away, or at all... (Friggin McKee....)

But he also is shown gaining victories, whether it be in fighting or in his outward charisma towards others (i.e., the villagers). And, he's actually one of the most introspective and observant characters in the film (from what I remember anyhow)...

Hmm, was that "film analysis"? Pssh, I get 10 points knocked off for that. Boooo....

Animation paper, Colerase pencils. Yosh.