I've had so much fun doing the birthday caricatures of my friends that I thought I would try the same on myself. To up the challenge, not that my "unconventional" head shape isn't enough, I decided to
do a model-sheet style turn around. Boy, was that not fun.
At the same time, I've been doing a redesign on my superhero character. I'd gotten enough comments about it resembling other superheroes and the character art being too small, that I decided that a redesign was in order. I always knew that I wanted some kind of medieval connection to the character so I started pushing in that direction.
After I had the new design locked down. I started to play with character color variations. I stayed pretty close to the original Blue and Orange, but muted it and added some armor.
Next up was building the character in Toon Boom Animate Pro. From there, I was able to play with the line weight until I found one that would look good once shrunk down. I've always wanted that retro- arcade look, even though the character is probably way bigger in resolution than any of those other games were.
The other benefit to working in Animate Pro, is that I can use bones and symbols to simulate animation without having to redraw everything. Hopefully, it will cut down on a lot of the time I'll spend creating the animations. Below is a quick test (definitely not final animation).
That's all for now. If you'd like to see more updates as I they happen, visit my blog at
www.NeedYourDisease.com or follow me on twitter at
NeedYourDisease
-Ben Hale
