Pinterest Study 02 | Pt. 1 — The Black Hole of Overthinking

So, maybe about a year or two ago, I decided to do a quick character design exercise in an attempt to actually make use of the pins on my pinterest board. The design was inspired by two images that happened to be in close proximity to each other, which I thought would look pretty cool together. 

One was a pair of pants of the Kiko Kostadinov brand, and the other, a photo shoot of an individual in a gas mask created by IKEUCHI Hiroto. 

Both entities are really interesting in their own right, so here are the links to their websites/projects: 

https://kikokostadinov.com/ | https://www.sfdept.tokyo/

The hakama-like pair of pants combined with the top-knot hairstyle and gas mask inspired me to draw this, sort of, streetwear-wearing samurai. I thought that an emphasis on the unique quality of the hakama — the opening in the sides of the pants — would be an interesting take on the samurai in streetwear illustrations that I’ve come across in the past couple of years.

I really loved the pink color of this person’s hair as well, and wanted to create a color scheme based on that. I thought of a vague sort of magma theme, as well as a water-like counterpart — images of the great Hokusai wave came to mind. And finally, I thought it’d be neat to incorporate some graphical elements — geometric shapes as abstraction of the two elements, that resemble patterns commonly found in kimono and greeting cards.

I felt pretty good about these ideas, but I didn’t feel all too confident about the actual execution, because of my unfamiliarity with traditional Japanese clothing. I did some basic research on hakama, but I’d often have second thoughts as to whether or not I had enough knowledge. All the while, I just had more and more increasingly granular concerns and questions, and the scope of my research began to grow more and more broad.

I think, in retrospect, I didn’t have the confidence to risk the potential of making mistakes. But, since the purpose of this is to practice designing something, I really should have moved forward with whatever creative decisions I made, with the knowledge that I had at the time, and to be open to opportunities for improvement. Being able to finish and move on to more projects is much better than spinning my wheels with a single one, after all.

Where I Ended Up (Pt. 1)

These are, of course, retrospective thoughts, but fortunately, during that time, I did manage to still keep going. I remembered that I was essentially drawing sportswear with hakama elements, so that helped me to focus. I looked up references of hakama for the purpose of understanding how the side openings looked and functioned. This helped me to apply that concept to the types of pants that these characters were wearing. I collected the reference images that I needed and built off of my initial sketches until I more or less settled on something that I liked. 

In this case, I chose the general shape and style of the pants and shoes that I wanted for each character.

I still felt stuck in my uncertainty with specific elements of the clothing, so in this case, I wrote down some notes on each aspect of the drawing that I was unsure about. That way, I could look up information on one specific thing at a time, rather than trying to cover everything at once, or continue to feel this general sense of uncertainty. 

Even after all of that, I remained stuck at this stage for quite some time, but I do manage to move forward again. I’ll talk about that later.