Interlude créatif – Yakuza – Page 2

Abonnez-vous pour ne rien manquer! || Subscribe to get the latest news!

***Cliquez ici pour la version française***

Last fall my good friend started playing the Yakuza games. After a few hours in the games, she recommended them to me and since it just so happened that the first six games were on sale… I told myself « why not » and installed Yakuza 0.

Turns out the answer to « why not » was « Because you’ll have no life and no money left Karine! » !!!

Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to get so invested in these stories; I’ve always been under the impression that it was a « fighting game » and I’m more into RPG with a deeper story that will consume 9000 hours of my life (Hello there Skyrim, Dragon Age and Mass Effect…).

Now that I’m five games in, I’ve decided that a fan art project in honor of these games that completely surprised me was clearly necessary!

Here’s my epic adventure in trying to crochet my two favorite characters!

First up was the character that was considered the main protagonist of the series… at least for the first three games.

I have to say that making Kiryu Kazuma was pretty easy. The main challenge was to do his gravity defying hair justice…

As well as his infamous frowny face lol!

I’m actually very happy with how he turned out, but I wasn’t actually worried about it because I’ve made quite a few suit wearing tiny dolls.

It’s very funny that, eventhough Kiryu is (or was) a more important character… I’ve spent way less time making him than the next character!

A character that wasn’t even supposed to be all that important in the series…

Majima Goro wasn’t supposed to end up taking as much space as he does in these games… but he rapidly became a fan favorite and the rest is history!

But, oh.my.god., he was such a pain to put into amigurumi form!

I hesitated for a bit to go with his Yakuza 0 look because it would have been much easier; black suit, white shirt, ponytail…

But it’s not his iconic look.

Which meant I had to figure out how to crochet a « snake skin » jacket… or figure out how to tattoo his whole back. Of course since these dolls are going to be in my personnal collection, I have a bit of leeway with the details!

I know you all can tell from the pictures that I actually made two sets, but thankfully my friend is also nice enough to give me a bit of leeway lol!

However, I decided to make my own life difficult and try to actually tattoo the doll by printing the image and getting my paint pens out!

It was quite the adventure…

I started out trying to see if it would work by trying to get the paint to transfer to a tissue. It gave me the knowledge that my white paint dries too quickly… or that I’m way too slow for it to work.

It was also an excellent reminder that these dolls are tiny.

Because it wasn’t working out on the tissue I decided that it would maybe magically work on a bumpy crochet fabric.

« And if it doesn’t I’ll just make his jacket! »

I wish I could give « past me » a good slap to the back of the head…

Any sane person would have just gone on to make the jacket instead of messing the poor doll even more… but not me!

Nope, I told myself that maybe if I gave the whole back a coat of white…

I wish I could go back and slap myself twice.

I don’t know if I was just bad at it, or if it would have actually worked if I had been working on a larger doll and a larger image.

I’m also guessing that if the image had been less detailed, it might have helped. A lot.

I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to include this whole ordeal; it seemed foolish to talk so much about this when it actually failed.

At the same time, I often talk about how social media is filled to the brim with toxic positivity and a « perfection filter » that can be very dangerous. Thus I figured it was important for me to share even this failed attemps! Still, please be nice in the comments lol!

As a side note, I have to say that I am happy with the parts on the front. Since he doesn’t wear a shirt with his jacket, it felt important for his tattoos to at least peek out… I guess I didn’t waste my time then?

On to the jacket… and by then I really didn’t want to experiment much.

I decided to just make a gold jacket and leave it as is. At first I had every intention to embroider some black details… or to get the paint pens out again…

But by the time I was done assembling the dolls, I had forgotten about these plans… and when I remembered, I really didn’t want to mess up the dolls anymore!

For the eyepatch, at first I was just going to crochet a small circle and call it a day, but it was too thick.

I didn’t have any fake leather on hand, but I had the idea to use electrical tape (folded on itself)… and the result was just perfect!

I’m only a bit disappointed that I didn’t have a metallic silver pen thin enough to draw the snake on.

It was impossible to sew on so I had to use glue… and once I managed to pry my fingers from the tube, I added a black string as the eyepatch’s straps… and I was almost done!

The only thing left? We just could not have a tiny Majima-san with no baseball bat so I got the air dry clay out and got to work!

Did you play any of the games from this series?