(・へ・)

kendo pratice /  剣道 稽古

something from a thing im working on atm, a lil charging ninja guy. 

indulgent side note: i’ve actually been rewatching early Naruto a bit lately, and while it doesn’t really hold up too well in comparison to something more recent like BNHA (whose popularity I believe to be wholly justified by the fact that it’s one of the best shōnen series made in quite a while) Naruto holds a special place in my heart as the first anime I watched almost in its entirety online. Like, I would literally go on early youtube and watch episodes split up into 3 parts (since youtube videos couldn’t go longer than 10 mins), hopping from uploader to poor-quality uploader. It was kind of the perfect material for a young(ish) aspiring weeb like myself, taking place as it does in a bizarre, steampunk send-up of mythological Japan. it feels weird to say (about fucking Naruto of all things), but that show probably influenced my art & storytelling a lot.

One of the things i did in 2017 was take up the martial art Wing Chun. I did a fair bit of karate (shotokan) when i was a kid, so it was nice to come back to something like that, although the two styles are very different. I’d say my primary interest in any martial art is pretty surface level - I just think they look cool. As a kid I watched a lot of martial arts movies and played a lot of fighting games, and I loved the variety of different ways they showed people moving.

Wing Chun (/Wing Tsun/however you decide to spell it) is a style from the south of China. Allegedly developed by the only female member of the so-called Five Elders of Shaolin, a lady called Ng Mui. There’s a story about developing it after having seen a crane fighting a snake or something but there are so many similar legends about various styles from that period they all get a bit interchangeable. I mostly like it because, unlike other kung fu styles (especially northern ones), it has little to no unnecessary movement - no big stances, hand waving etc. If you’re being punched, you just kind of step in & push their hand aside with the least possible amount of effort and bop them. It sounds simple, but watching it in practice is really cool to me, and even in its simplicity it manages to get some really cool body & arm shapes. 

So I decided to animate some of the latter! The symbols on the side of the machine correspond to the techniques that the arm is performing - in order, tan sau, bong sau, juk jeung, wu sau, fuk sau and jung kuen. Merry christmas!

bak mei combo (might go back and add some sfx at some point)

the wanderers

choppin’ wood

runaway demon in a pot

necromancer accompanied by her trusty tomb slug