Shotokan Tiger

Well I've had this bit of artwork sitting on my hard drive all lonesome like for some time now, and I think it deserves a blog post, as well as getting thrown on my deviantart gallery. This is a rendition I made of what is usually referred to as the "Shotokan tiger", a calligraphic logo used by many karate organizations today, especially those adhering to the Shotokan style label. Its uses are easy enough to find without me linking them directly and risk encouraging people to read the drivel that appears on the majority of karate federation's sites, most of whom have done everything in their inept power to ensure that as few people as possible practice karate in a gainful fashion.

A better blog post than mine about the Shotokan tiger has already been made by prominent online karate writer Rob Redmond on his 24 Fighting Chickens site, so it doesn't bear repeating in length. Go read it! Short story shorter: a Japanese artist named Hoan Kusugi, friend/student of Shotokan founder Gichin Funakoshi, drafted the tiger back in the 1920's for the purpose of appearing on Funakoshi's book which would serve as the master text of karate, the tora no maki. The tiger logo is a visual pun on this Japanese idiomatic expression, which translated literally means "tiger's roll".

I had made a freehand pencil sketch of the tiger for a drawing class I was in to practice outlines, and I later scanned it and played around with coloring with various abstract color patterns. Using Illustrator's handy-dandy live trace and paint, I converted the sketch to vector art, imported it into Photoshop, made a selection mask to cut out various color textures pasted into new layers, added a drop shadow, a beveled overlay layer, and voilà. The original Illustrator and Photoshop files, and PNG outputs of the various iterations I made are available free here:

http://www.slackerdojo.com/toranomaki/
http://www.slackerdojo.com/toranomaki/pngs/

As far as I am concerned, my version is available as public domain. Use these in whatever fashion you want. If anyone does happen upon this island in the net and finds some neat use for these, feel free to let me know.