Shodan!

Yesterday I received my shodan black belt in karate!



It was a long journey, started as far as 1981. When I gave up with karate long time ago I thought it was for good. But as they say, karate-do no shugyo wa isssho de aru, it will take you entire life to learn karate.
And Oscar Sensei got my name embroidered in katakana on the black belt!

Tobiyokogeri graffiti

For this kick I started from a couple of pictures of Elena, I wanted to work from a model (with some trick to make her fly...).
I made 3 versions of this drawing: the paintbrush and Indian ink sketch, a Photoshop colored line art, and this digital graffiti. I am posting the latter because I think it looks better, and it is also another attempt to use digital painting in a non-canonical way.

Photoshop digital painting
Click on image to enlarge

The tiger in the background is the classic logo of shotokan karate, painted by Japanese artist Hoan Kosugi.

Martial arts Resume

I am putting this together to recap what I did so far with martial arts - quite a back and forth journey, and still far away from destination.

1981-1984: Shotokan Karate (with Fesika - Hiroshi Shirai's Italian federation)

These 4 years were ground-setting for my technique. In this period I learnt the building how-to blocks: how to use hips, how to breath, how to shift weight, how to get the timing right.

Then in 1984 I was disqualified during a national kumite tournament because - apparently - I did not control enough my techniques. I did not find this correct, blaming the referees, thus I decided to quit traditional karate for kickboxing, which in those years was becoming popular.

1984-1989 Kick Boxing (Yamato Damashii, WAKO)

The best kickboxing club in my town, Yamato Damashii, was directed by Federico Milani, a world-class athlet and since then the technical director of the Italian kickboxing federation. A wonderful opportunity to train with many great athlets. A bit difficult in the beginning, for example because I was not used to hooks and I did not know how to slip or bob punches.
I stopped a full year in 1986 because of my military services, then when I came back I trained another 2 years with decreasing motivation. For some reason I felt unsatisfied with pure kickboxing, also in 1989 I moved to Milano and decided to stay quiet for a while and concentrate on my "real" studies - computer science.

1990-1997 Wushu and (from 1996 until now) Sanda, PWKA

In 1990 I joined almost by luck PWKA (I was going to buy my contact lenses, when I saw the gym door while walking in a street and decided to have a look). PWKA was practically just created by Walter and Paolo Lorini, who after many years of karate - Paolo has been the youngest Italian black belt - moved to Chinese kung fu. They were then among the handful of Italian masters who had been in China to learn martial arts, and brought to their club from Shanghai master Cao Wei Ming. Master Cao taught wushu and sanda in fashion quite close to the Chinese way, in terms of intensity of training, skills, techniques and body conditionings.

Indeed compared to my previous experiences, I consider training with PWKA the equivalent of a university.

I decided to learn wushu with Paolo Lorini, after the long period where I trained only on fighting, I wanted to concentrate exclusively on forms. And this time the step on the ladder was really high. The first year was quite frustrating because I could not stretch enough, I was not fast enough, not coordinated enough, and in general everybody was better than me. In 1990 I also completed my studies and I begun to work, with less and less time for training.
Paolo occasionally made us spar a half hour of sanda after the Wushu class, to get the proper feeling of wushu movements. I had a full year of stop in 1994 - a job abroad - and in 1996, thanks to a new job which was less demanding on the personal time, I decided to couple wushu with sanda. Actually I liked sanda so much that in 1997 I quit wushu (you can't really jump or stretch that much when your are over 30s).
Again sanda is really for me the university of full-contact combat sports, with an unbeaten variety of strategies and tactics that can be adjusted to the height, weight and age. Compared to my kickboxing years today I am 20 years older and 20 kilos heavier, but I still train and have fun - I just tuned my weaponry to my current conditions.
Also in this period Elena and I went to China (Beijing and Shaolin) to train there.

2005 - today: Shotokan karate again (with FEIKA)
In 2005 Elena discovered that in our street lives a karate master (Oscar Scaglioni, 7th dan) and convinced me to go back to step one: shotokan karate. She was curious about karate - Elena begun martial arts from judo - while I was doubtful, I did not think that karate could be fun or that I could learn something new.

I was wrong: in fact now I am training in both karate and sanda, which I feel can be combined quite well. I think that sanda experience brings energy to my karate, and karate's crisp, exact techniques are refining my sanda toolbox.

But what I find really amazing is the number of things I still have to learn, after these many years.

1 Nov postscriptum: in 2005 I also trained Taijiquan, Yang style (the Cheng Man Ching variant). I quitted after the first year. I acknowledge the value of internal martial arts but I am probably not ready for them: I need to sweat and I need to feel the burn of lactic acid the day after training.

Elena with double swords graffiti

Another Photoshop graffiti, this time with Elena soloing with double katanas.
The "inspiration" is a drawing of Psylocke by Jim Lee from an X-men graphic novel, which I modified to reflect Elena's face and body.

Photoshop digital painting
Click on image to enlarge

As always when copying a master this was a good learning experience, I really saw how complex and sofisticated is the graphic work contained in these comic books.

I applied almost completely the instructions of Melissa Clifton's tutorial on Colouring Line Art. I am quite happy with the final drawing, although I think that for the purpose of making digital graffiti I'd better use a less refined picture to provide a more spraycan-like feeling.

Sanda basic takedowns

Another interesting video clip on sanda takedowns. It is clearly taken from a Chinese instructional video and it shows all the fundamental techniques, performed with different speeds and seen from different view angles.

Caveat: some of these will not really work unless there is a significant technical gap between the opponents.

Sanda takedowns from the World Championship in Macau 2003

Martials arts cannot be described by text, they are inherently a performance that can be captured only (and still only partially) by a video. This is one of the reasons why when I begun training around 1981 the only "real" things available were judo and karate, the rest being quite made up from cheap kung fu and ninja movies. There was no way to assess the reality of what passed for kung fu, and nobody could go to China to check.



Nowadays video clipping services such as Google Video and YouTube contain a lot of interesting footage that can be immediately shared. For example, this clip from the World Championship in Macau, 2003 is a good collection of sanda takedowns performed by top level athlets

It's the (martial) art: Elena vs. Marco virtual spraycan

While I fancied about drawing another virtual spraycan picture on the facade of my house like this, I decided to experiment with Photoshop instead of going through the lenghty preparation that watercolors or oil painting nee. With the little free time I have, completing a watercolor takes me at least 3 days and an oil painting almost 3 months.

This time I was driven by 3 ideas:

1) doing graffiti - the truly postmodern art - without looking silly at my age
2) learning more Photoshop, that I believe can be the new leading medium in visual arts after 6 centuries of oil painting
3) drawing Elena and myself fighting, always a funny subject

Photoshop digital painting
Click on image to enlarge

So I made a quick, rough sketch, took a snapshot of it with my Nokia camera, and fired up Photoshop.

Then I followed a great tutorial by Melissa Clifton about colouring line art. I read a few tutorials, but Melissa's is the best because it gives a concrete and practical approach, without leaving out the details and supporting difficult points with accurate, step-by-step explanations.

I also discussed with the Master of the Temple the results, and he gave me useful suggestions on how to tune the lights and the shadows. In deed, the blending of the graffiti with the background picture was a bit odd because of the different reflection given by the metal framework and the glasses.

I quite like the final picture, Photoshop graffiti is an interest subject to investigate. But it is not a shortcut - it took me about 3 days to complete.

Martial arts: the Qin Na of master Zhao Da Yuan

Back in summer 1997 I had the chance to meet master Zhao Da Yuan in Beijing, and have a brief lesson on Qin Na. Zhao Da Yuan is the chief instructor of martial arts at the police academy in Beijing, and a master of Ba Gua Zhang. He wrote an great book on this topic combining his experience on qin na techniques with a sound biomechanical approach.

The result is a book entitled "Practical Chin Na", translated now in several languages, which is an excellent introduction to this discipline.

Unfortunately master Zhao did not let me take pictures or shoot videos (except one after the lesson, where we look sweat, dusty and beaten up) , but I recorded some of the techniques when we were in Shaolin, before we forgot all the sequences . Then recently I started converting my VHS videos into digital format and this is what I recovered:

(six VHS frames combined with Photoshop - click image to enlarge)

In this sequence, shot in one of the gym inside the International Shaolin Wushu Guild, Ivan and Andrea are demonstrating one of the qin na techniques we learnt, while in the background Elena is rehearsing what looks like Lohanquan.

Martial arts: 10 years of sanda

I became aware of sanda as martial art in 1990, thanks to the effort that PWKA made in getting to Italy Chinese masters from the mainland and visiting periodically the PRC. Nowadays this is fortunately a common practice, but back then a good part of what was pushed for kung fu was in fact karate mixed with some made-up, esoteric looking sequence of movement.

Today sanda is a well known discipline available in any good gym of chinese martial arts, with a reliable definition in wikipedia.
Actually the sanda tournament rules I placed on my website back in 1997 are a bit outdated. Sanda today is structured in 4 main levels: beginners, amateurs, semi-professional and professional.

In a beginners tournament the athlets fight with a moderate contact (no KO), with 2 rounds of 1 minute each and a 30 seconds break between them. The fight is seamless, meaning that the referee does not stop the match to assign points.

Amateurs fight with KO, with 2 rounds of 2 minutes each and a break of 1 minute. A third round is required if the score is even at the end of the second one.

Semi-professional athlets fight on the distance of 3 rounds of 2 minutes each, while a professional match spans over 5 rounds of 3 minutes each, with a break of 60 seconds.

The use of elbows and knees is now permitted, and only in the professional category. Another important difference is that semi-professionals and professionals wear only boxing gloves, mouthpiece and groincup (no headgear or chest protection), much like in the other kickboxing disciplines. In fact sanda athlets begun to partecipate to K1-like tournments with interesting results.

But then I would argue that sanda without takedowns is just kickboxing, because the strategy for close-quarter, which I believe to be the most distinctive element of sanda, is just the same.

It's the (martial) art: Anna with fighting Felicia

The cat doing some kung fu position is an idea I took by reading Rumiko Takahashi mangas. And combining Anna's peculiar grin with the cat she found some months ago generated this watercolor.

(Click on image to enlarge)

Watercolor on paper, 24x33 cm

More precisely the stance in the bottom right corner is a Taiji classic, tso peng from the sequence Grasping the sparrow's tail, while the others are bits of wushu's bu xing: ma bu, pu bu and duli bu.