durr

After the visual culture lecture on a National Identity, I looked into Tokyo's national identity and found that there was a organized crime business called the Yakuza. I found that there were three head's gangs of the Yakuza and that some of their traditions included having a full body excluding head tattoo that was like a dragon.
I tried drawing out these designs for animals based on the Yakuza and the Italian Mafia. I got the inspiration from my own cat who reminds me of a Mafia boss so I drew him as one. I used fineliners for this and decided to do a rabbit version with the Italian mafia.
The hands on the rabbit design are too small and the anatomy is off but I like how the facial expression turned out as it looked similar to how a rabbit gets freaked out. With my cat design, the head is way too huge in proportion to the body and yet again the hand is too small, as well as this I put too much pen on the eyes and it contrasts badly with the rest of the fine lines of the body. I do however like the design of his suit and how his ears turned out, I also like how intimidating he looks as this portrays how I feel about cats well.
I also tried out doing a design for a fish, but i didnt like how the face turned out as it doesn't look anything like he would be part of the mafia so i instead based him off of a skater style. I do however like how his suit turned out and the shading with the pen.



I tried doing a print on water colour paper, I drew from a french bulldog and then redrew it out onto lino, i coloured over the watercolour paper with brusho red and orange and then tried to print over it. However it went wrong as I didnt wait for the paper to dry as I seemingly forgot how to lino print.
I did some more of these prints based on the anatomy of a rabbit, however I made it look like a dinosaur skeleton. I like the effect on the watercolour paper though so I tried it again on colourful watercolour paper which I coloured with brusho. I wanted to make the colours look scratchy to comply with how I did the print, as I used a scalpel for it, for the added scratchy effect. I also cut too deeply into the print and cut through it which did not help whilst printing.



I did these designs as I wanted to try out a surreal style pattern, however the rest of my work got in the way and I did not have time to finish them. I was planning on scanning the cat pattern into the computer and reflecting it on illustrator and creating it into a colourful pattern. I was also going to try this with my second pattern. I may still try it after my deadline just out of curiousity.



I tried out painting my cat whilst he slept, however he got up and moved so I could not continue, I however worked into it on photoshop and remade it into illustrator into a pattern.



I tried some effects with bleach, unfortunately the bleach didnt effect the black paper all that much so I tried again with chalk on beforehand and going over it with bleach then, yet it still didn't have a very interesting effect.