亥　Inoshishi

Inoshishi is Japanese for boar. Like TakoButa-san, this picture was inspired by a competition, albeit with somewhat more stringent rules. For one thing, the subject was a boar – kind of a pig with anger-management problems. The image had to be one-color and fit inside a 15cm circle. I had been wanting to do a single color image for a while (and I plan on doing more in the near future), so I turned this into an experiment with positive and negative space. I also wanted to play around a bit with the decorative elements, the spirals and swirls shoved up against some perpendicular and parallel lines.

All in all, I like the image. It provides an interesting challenge for the viewer. Maybe more interesting to me than the piece itself is how the elements I was playing with here have found their way into my subsequent work. And who knows, this might make a cool t-shirt someday.