dj octavio

Splatoon x Mahjong

Posted on August 17, 2020 Leave a Comment

What started as a flippant remark turned into a little project! Thanks to Toad for inspiring this undertaking.

The suits are:
Eggs, featuring golden eggs from Salmon Run. This is a nice, simple substitute for the original “coin” themed suit.
Bamboo, featuring the old-men of Splatoon. While Captain Cuttlefish is represented via only his bamboozler gun, DJ Octavio stands in proudly as the 1-bam. A traditional Chinese set would depict a sparrow perched on a branch; here Octavio holds a stalk of wasabi. A Japanese set would more commonly depict a peacock – I enjoyed working some of the concentric circle details that might normally go into the peacock’s tail into Octavio’s helmet.
Snails, featuring my morphed rendition of a sea snail, doing its best to look like the character è¬ – ‘myriad’. (Toad said it initially struck him as being a boat – I guess as a nautical theme it works, though it doesn’t scream “Splatoon”). The character suit represents currency increments of 10,000 – when I was thinking about high-value stuff in Splatoon, sea snails sprang to mind!

I think these suits give us a nice little tour around some of the main areas of the game.

It took a bit of brainstorming to work out the dragon tiles but John suggested tying them into their loose suit associations – the green dragon is most often associated with bamboo because of the green hand, which leaves the red dragon paired with characters and the white dragon to go with balls. Luckily by the time he suggested this I had revised the eggs suit to contain more blue, so the colour association was present when he made the suggestion – though now I want to make them even more blue!

*Dragons as they may appear in a traditional mahjong set.*

Following the colour patterns, John suggested a Steel Eel could be used to depict the frame of a white dragon. He also suggested using Inklings and Octolings for the remaining two suits – while I took an inkling for the red dragon, I decided to try something different for the green.

With the bamboo suit being inspired by the rivalry between Captain Cuttlefish and DJ Octavio, I preferred the idea of giving a little more limelight to Cuttlefish rather than a generic Octoling. In addition, the Octolings you encounter in Octo Canyon tend to be red, so I didn’t really feel right making them green.

Cuttlegear Logo

I decided to play with the Cuttlegear logo and hint at that while also attempting to mimic the ç™¼ character. The left side of the character is meant to represent one of Captain Cuttlefish’s medals. I’m not totally happy with the current draft but it’ll do for now.

The winds are currently placeholders – I think that my handwriting is a bit ugly. I’d like to think of some thematic stuff to replace them with – so far I’m dwelling on thoughts of locations in Inkopolis Square… or something with the great Zapfish, since it got bumped from being one of the dragons…

Finally it might be fun to include a few extra tiles – perhaps the idols as season/flower tiles? Though I’m not sure how well I’d be able to pull them off with this colour palette.

Tako Drum Master

Posted on August 4, 2015 3 Comments

Inkling/Octoling society is rather interesting, and we’re fed just a little info about it via single player’s Sunken Sea Scrolls.

In one of those scrolls we spot the only male Octoling to feature anywhere in the game. I tried to imagine what he might get up to in his spare time – namely, dropping some sweet taiko beats. But we’ll call them Tako beats for the neat multilingual pun.

I’ve posted this image a couple of times previously (though not on my blog) so let’s not go too much more into the Splatoon aspect and instead look at the seal in the bottom right.

Regular readers will know that I often sign my works with a seal containing the top character. That character is in fact the Chinese version of my surname (Ling in Mandarin). It features two trees and has the meaning “Forest”.

I have been toying for some time with the idea of expanding on this seal to make it even more personalised. I do have a Chinese name that I could use (Yi-Fei) but I don’t particularly identify with it, not least because I think one of my Chinese teachers for a while thought it was Zhi-Fei and I was taught my own name incorrectly. I speak the rest of the language equally poorly as I know my own name so I wasn’t keen to include it in the seal.

So that left me with my English name, Alethea, which I quite adore. I decided to take elements of the name and turn it into a Sinogram of sorts, aping the look of Chinese characters and hinting at the English alphabet.

You can see a variety of Chinese scripts here, the evolution of the language has gone through many different appearances and stylisations! I chose to experiment with seal script and standard script. I also played around with going from very simple stylisation where the letters were more obvious to more abstract interpretations. Here are some of my experiments.

At conventions I like to do free watercolour name tags, so I worked a lot on the idea with the hope of offering commissioned Sinographs as a “tier” up from the free name tags. I’m hoping to also experiment with my laser cutter to be able to offer another tier – I’ll engrave your name into a physical seal. Experimenting with this idea, I filled many pages with Sinogram drafts, challenging myself to think of the letters in various different ways and practicing to perfect the style of each character and stroke.

Obviously to be able to offer these at cons would require me to actually have time at a convention to spend on them, and time in the evening to complete overnight work if I’m making physical seals. So, that kinda leads into a little internal debate I’m having over whether to do another table at Supanova in November.

Well, that ended up going from a very lazy blog post to a much longer one that touched on more topics than I’d expected! Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you again tomorrow.