- also known as 'Bushido code'

I wanted to make a sticker following the same themes of the Evil Daimyo series of guns. The most obvious solution would be to use the symbols, however they are extremely simple and a lot like team logos but unfortunately without a major follower base! Which in marketing terms made a strong case to instead think about creating something else, perhaps creating value in a more illustrative graphic. For a while now I’ve wanted to try out more detailed illustrative graphics rather than symbolic icons just to test the water, kind of like screenprinted T-shirt designs with minimal colours.

The Daimyo Colour scheme is monochrome (actually warm greys to be precise) with an accent colour, (red in the ‘evil’ series). This reminded me of early modernist design movements ie.
De Stijl, Russian Constructivism and later on International Typographic Style. Many of these movements have influenced present day artwork such as the White stripes album artwork, Frank Miller poster artwork (Sin city / 300), Shepard Fairey posters etc. With colour and theme sorted out I needed subject matter - which I followed from the Daimyo symbols - and made a katana wielding Samurai mid-swing. I first made a few scamps to get a basic composition then developed it further through sketching.

It just so happened on Holiday in Cornwall a while back I came across an unlikely exhibit at St. Michael's Mount, a full Samurai set of armor! - which didn’t really fit in with the other English heraldic paraphernalia - but nevertheless was incredibly impressive despite its condition. On a previous holiday to the same region I bought a full size replica sword called Excalibur at Tintagel castle, I posed with it to get the arms positioning spot on. Note: reference is never essential but it gives confidence in linework - especially with a realistic aesthetic, and also helps speed the process up. Once I got the positioning and foreshortening worked out I changed the sword and clothes to Samurai gear. I’ve made the samurai look more evil by modifying the mask to have elongated breathing holes - while doing this I was thinking of Predator, Silence of the lambs, and Bane in the Dark knight Rises. The holes are like scary teeth.

At this point when vectored up in Black and greys the Samurai started to look a little bit like Darth Vader - which I loved but also found inevitable as the dark lord costume is based on Samurai / WW2 pilot gear. In fact there are two really big influences on Starwars: Akira Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, and also numerous WW2 fighter pilot movies such as 633 Squadron. Incidentally I had an epiphany whilst arranging the layout when I put a closely cropped Starburst behind the Samurai for the holographic version - it looked a lot like a Tie fighter window - which most probably takes direct reference from a WW2 cockpit/turret window - but the composition of a Samurai in front of a Rising Sun must have been what Vader looked like from directly outside of his Tie Advanced during the trench phase of Star wars - it's a shot you don't actually see in the film as they went with an interior shot instead but I’d never thought of that unseen chance-symbolism until making this sticker!

For the lettering I was inspired by Sans-Serif Kanji which is known in the east as ‘Gothic’ Kanji: I wanted the lettering to be slightly broken to resemble brush strokes but made from solid blocks for a strong clear presence. I actually found a type-style that was similar to what I wanted which I’ve reworked.

As the color scheme was severely restrictive making transitions for the holo version was a problem as I didn’t want to compromise, in the end I transitioned between the set colours retaining integrity to the theme, but to make it interesting I added a subtle spectral effect to the grey which gives this wonderful holographic effect much akin to real life holograms!

Originally when I devised the background pattern (which is taken from the evil Daimyo skin texture) it was meant to have more complex transitioning in the Blue channel, but I ran into problems with mip-mapping pixellation at smaller sizes which looked hideous, so I had to problem solve on the go and swap many of the details between the channel layers. One benefit of this was that I eventually removed all holomap gradients - meaning in theory the spectrum map could be downsized to individual blocks of colour. As such I’ve got the Spectrum map file size down from 340k to 43k which is much more efficient. I also experimented with halving the width from 512px to 256px which resulted in a file size of 11k, but at this point it was a case of ‘diminishing returns’ with a marginally less crisp transition so I left it at 512px. But there’s really not much in it!

I also experimented with the wear string variables - I couldn’t find reference on Valves dev wiki for the strings as its considerably out of date for csgo stickers, but through twiddling the sliders I’ve finally figured out that $wearwidthmin and $wearwidthmax give the illusion of substrate thickness at the begining and end of the wear transition. I left the paper version a little bit scuffed when unworn as it fitted with the rough aesthetic, but holo demanded a cleaner look.

Damn thats a lot of waffle, there’s more but I could write but I think you get the gist. Let me know what you guys think!