Samurai Tiger Mask

August 5, 2020

I’ve been working a bit on a lot of different arts, and for once, they’re not FF14 related (well, not all of them are at least).

Chris got Ghost of Tsushima the other week, and I’ve been enjoying watching him play it. It’s inspired some art, which I’ll get up here eventually. (I have so much stuff to get up here it’s not even funny). But, to mix it up, instead of doing realistic Oni samurai masks, he suggested doing one in some sort of “vaporwave” style – basically, think late 80s early 90s video games, word art, random Japanese, and those Solo Jazz paper cup patterns.

Yes, I’m totally serious.

Keeping that in mind, I’m a real novice at this whole aesthetic thing. You’ll see a lot of it in music, games, and streetwear lately, all around the world. But I’m just stumbling around trying to get it, and here’s one of my first attempts.

This started as a reference of a tiger samurai mask, and went from there. I’m proud of the color choices, and I swear, I spent more time trying to find brushes to write the katakana and then actually writing and rewriting and rewriting it over and over and over again. But in the end, I’m proud of it.

It got me thinking about more fun ideas on playing with colors and lines. I’ll also try to post my halftone (those dots, used to shade in printing back in the day) brushes one day soon. it only took forever to make them so they line up just right, but now that I have them, I love using them. But that’s for another post.

And yes, it looks fantastic as an actual mask!