SonicTK

The Proficiencist

» Written on January 27, 2007 at 9:30 AM «

It’s not perfect until he says it is. Now in a humongous size for your own reshaping needs.

Is ‘proficiencist’ even a proper word? I don’t know, but someone sure as hell hates it; it’s even been slashed wide open.

Anyway, as you can probably tell, that’s what I’ve been working on over the weekend. The story behind that character actually goes a long way back, since my days in Secondary 4 (That’s Year 10 for you US junkies), in fact, starting out as random doodles in class after watching too much Samurai Jack and playing too much CS. Maybe I’ll upload some scans of my early pencil sketches of him. (I think I actually have the original somewhere, but I’ll have to dig through my scraps to find him. Yes, I do actually keep my doodles, even those done on worksheets and assignments. In fact, I started doing so since Secondary 4, coincidentally.)

In any case, here’s the one I did with my Wacom for reference purposes during his transition to vectors.

I changed a lot since his initial conception, after a little research on Wikipedia about the traditional outfits, or Gi, that samurai are supposed to wear. (I do believe I used the plural form of that particular noun right there) For instance, I remember initially giving him a more kimono-ish outfit, especially with regard to his lower garments. I only decided to add the folds that bear a slight resemblance to aikidogi after some thought and a taste for black and white. Seriously, everything looks better that way.

The snow (you can see it if you look really really closely) was something I threw in as an afterthought, after considering what kind of environment I wanted for this piece. Originally, this was going to be a two-tone stylized piece which I intended for placement on a T-shirt, but in the end, I decided that this would be an excellent opportunity for me to demonstrate to myself just what I could do with Illustrator’s Mesh tool. After seeing some of the work on Life in Vector, I was kind of inspired to try something with what everyone else had gone through. Besides, the irony struck me as oddly amusing; here I would be attempting a stylized, almost cartoonish piece with the kind of detail normally given to full-out illustrations like the one I did with Blues, except that I didn’t even touch the mesh tool at all when working on that particular illustration except for the girl’s mouth.

Irony is what drives all of us, anyway.

The bamboo, cliche though it may seem, is actually highly significant, and I do believe it was in my initial sketch of the concept itself, before Nick La got his own skilled hands to work on his own renditions superior. To say that his work did not filter into my mind while working on my own Chinese touch would be a lie; however, I’m quite certain that everything you see in thumbnail and fullsize above comes entirely of my own two hands and mind, without external guidance. Not to say that his bamboo isn’t good enough for my character, but I wanted something with a little more rustic feel to it. Besides, it’s going to be sliced by an extremely sharp (and polished) katana; we wouldn’t want that happening to fresh green bamboo, now would we?

I do realize that if it were really snowing, that there’d be certain snowflakes present on said bamboo, but goddamn, a man can only draw so much a day. Or take so much crap, actually; I had yet another altercation with my own family again after a very, very rough dinner. I won’t go into specifics, but let’s just say my mother was involved as usual, and we all know what that means.

Perhaps I will elaborate when Sitesled finally comes back online and lets me publish this post. Honestly, they seem to be going down more often these days.

But everything has an upside; BiTMAP has let me onto a certain tip that just revitalized my torrents from bytes per second to screaming kilobytes; I just needed to turn packet encyrption on. It appears that my ISP, Starhub, has finally started to throttle BitTorrent traffic, which is kind of sad in itself, as I always held a certain level of respect for it. At least they aren’t actively blocking it, but still, this can only be a sign of things to come.

Such as DRM in Windows Vista, which is only a few days away from being released commercially. I can’t wait to get my oily hands on a new rig with said OS pre-installed, maybe with an Ubuntu partition to go along with it. The DRM is a drawback, though; I’ll have to see about that, like I did with my PSP, which, by the way, is nearing that certain point where it can finally be downgraded back to version 1.5 firmware; I hear even TA-082 boards have fallen prey to the homebrew community now, and such news makes me cackle with glee as thoughts of turning my PSP into a portable Linux station filter through my mind.

Which, by the way, is already thinking about how to turn this critter into a T-shirt design worthy of such branding. Perfection must be achieved; proficiency must be attained.

UPDATE: Since Sitesled was down yesterday, I got around to scanning some of the older sketches I did. It certainly brings back memories.

Here’s the original one I did, circa 2005 or so.

Another early one. You can probably tell by now that I didn’t want him to use a katana at first: I was thinking more about rapiers and such, as I was fascinated with them thanks to playing MU Online in those days.

Yet another. The idea of having not bamboo, but an arm/hand flying off with a bloodied silhouette in the background held some appeal to me, but in the end sanity appeared to prevail. Curses!

A completely different take on it, but still inspired by the same theme. And maybe just a bit of Ninja Gaiden.

I was actually going to do something like this, with the character having a piece of bamboo out of his mouth, before deciding against it.

This one was actually kind of weird; I was drawing a lot of cartoonish stuff, and end ed up with the Proficiencist himself as an afterthought.

You can see a little remnant of another doodle I did right there. I was going to use a pose like this, actually, but I decided on something less aggressive in stance. Also, you can probably tell by now that my decision to switch from a simple cloth cover to a slightly more complicated (and black) folded lower gi was recent.

Anyway, I also updated the wallpaper with a new, improved version: I’ve fixed a minor few annoyances that were annoying, such as his hands and a certain area of the gi. Nothing too major, truth be told, but I’m a perfectionist.

Such history behind this character! In fact, the only other doodle I’ve transformed into such reality after times longest would have have to be Hard Life, except that I haven’t been working on it at all as of late. I’ll have to get cracking on that soon though.

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» Written on January 27, 2007 at 9:30 AM «

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