Designing Dolion Kroe + Ep 6 news

Due to the nice bump in funding from Ep 5's release we're already recording ep 6's VA's next week! Pretty exciting stuff ahead!

While that happens I thought I'd give a mini delve into designing one of the toughest characters for the series; Dolion Kroe.

Once a relic from the 2009's Original Character Tournament era, Gustav, now Dolion, got his rebrand from our 2017 comic version of Monkey Wrench;

Carrying the theme of green and being a crazy doctor™, he was more upright and a bit more full bodied; though having a very gloopy skull and floating eyes in his shiny dome tank complete with lab coat. He was going to be totally wacky and craaazy!!!1

After getting 90 pages of chapter 1 does back in late 2017 my hard drive decided to explode and being a fool i didn't back up much. Only the 'Villains' and 'Lariat' flas remained.

I got dejected for a good year before deciding to start again around 2019 and made SURE to make backups of everything this time.

This new new™ comic version was well underway, and chapter 1 featured some early Dolion designs;

Bonus early Killix and 62

Then covid hit.

With all the money I had saved from various freelance jobs just sitting in my accounts , and with Ash and I being on an animation watching binge, we decided to turn this into an animated series. And so at the start of 2020 we began the 2 year development process for the Pilot ep of Monkey Wrench (which is basically now ep 1)

With it now being animated, and knowing Dolion was going to appear somewhere in Ep 5, I had to come up with a way to make Dolion 'animatable'.

I don't think anyone would enjoy making his insane goopy comicy design move.

I originally wanted to retain some design motifs from his comic inception, he became a bit more simple, his eyes were still floating but now his teeth were as well. And instead of a skull he had a brain;

I tried giving him electric hair on the outside of his jar, giving his jar a nose, even removing his hair and elongating his teeth.

At first I felt happy with this design. Those of you who have been patrons since 2021 should notice a familiar shape in the season one Xmas character line up;

After progressing to Ep 3 I started to feel something was off.

This Dolion didn't really feel he fit this universe, the new tone, or the role he has to play; he felt too goofy and unserious.

So back to the drawing board I went!

He needed to be scary, unnerving to look at but at the same time feel frail and weak. Having a limited colour palette should really help sell it.

I eventually, after much trial and error, came to the Dolion we see in ep 5;

He has his big rompy urchin body to get around in, but on the inside he's this withered skull with long flowing hair; his eyes unable to blink due to losing his eyelids rotting away, and his teeth, fused and elongated, unable to open or even to eat.

If you guys would like more posts like this, delving into design stuff, I may do more if I don't have anything to post for an update.

Let me know, and see you guys for next week for a possible toe dip into the voices of Ep 6!

With your guys' support this would not be possible!