Some more concept art

Been mostly sorting out my tax return this past week so there hasn't been too much time on this thing, but I have done a few more doodles.

I get the feeling I should watch Beowulf at some point

Knowing I have a general habit of coming up with one character design and more or less going with it (it comes from a job where you don't have time to waste on concepts), I decided to have a crack at some various designs, although they generally stuck to the beardy muscly variety, with the exception of the top left, which is influenced a little by Kratos from the God of War videogames. For the muscly designs, I tried thinking about how I can compose the dudes out of various shapes, mainly triangles and squares.

When thinking about the epic battle montage (what I may do is just produce one or two 30 second animations for the contest brief, then use the remainding time to make a full version for uni), one of the things that popped into my mind was the opening one and a half minutes of the ever-so infamous episode of the Super Mario World cartoon, Mama Luigi.



With 'Fire Sumo' fresh in my mind, I thought to myself, 'hey, there should BE a fire sumo'. Who's gonna make the connection? >_>

Fire SUMO!!!

So what you basically have is what it says on the tin, er, paper. A sumo, that's on fire. I drew it out with my fancy felt pens, starting with the orange outline, throwing in some yellow shade, then some more orange shade and finished off with some red highlighting to bring out the outlines. Marvellous. If I do go with Fire Sumo, I may present his scene in a traditional Japanese style (ie. not anime, think more that BBC Promo from the 2008 Olympics).

Also feature, an idea for an iPod-based badnik that never really caught on.

Since HMV sells its fair share of video games for sale, I figured it'd be fair game (sorry) to give that side some representation. When you think videogame nasties, a large number of people would most likely think of good ol' Dr Robotnik (aka Dr Eggman) from the Sonic games. And thus, came the creation of Professor Manegg, who represents the dark side of all things...erm egginess, sporting an easter-style pencil crayon face and a lil bread soldier sticking into his gooey insides. As well as the obvious Robotnik influence, I thought about the old-school videogame hero Dizzy, an egg who also sports red gloves and boots. This reference stuck out due to recently working on a Weebl series called '8 Bit Pwny Club', of which one of the characters also parodies Dizzy. I also drew up Professor Manegg in flash for the lulz.

The brown chequered background is a reference to Robotnik's ball of doom from Sonic 1.

Will post some more concept art, and maybe give a little thought into research, in the next post. Stay tuned!