My Spiny Valentine

Here we have a little creature feature for you folks at home! This particularly prickly individual is one of the several bosses that our G33ky heroes may come across in their many adventures.

Believe it or not, he's hardly a couple days old! Boy, they sure do grow up fast! Let's take a look at some of the stages of this enigmatic echidna's design development!

Initially, he was bound to be a malicious and menacing mole, but a certain amount of--as we say in the biz--"oomph" was missing.

After letting the idea sit for a while, we see an attempt to combine a badger with a mole and echidna(left), but there wasn't a real solid direction to the design. Luckily, after simplifying it to "monstrous echidna" we were rolling in the right direction!

This is where we slap on a flashy coat of paint and explore a small selection of poses as the design starts to take form. The big nose was reminiscent of the mythical Tengu, so the white beard and red body are there to reflect that spark of inspiration.

After the initial sketches, we move over to traditional techniques and sketch our pokey pal out on paper. On paper, I can get a more natural feel of how the character is going to be fleshed out; Funny how it works that way sometimes!

After the paper sketches are finished and in the inbox, they're ready to be scanned and inked on the computer. Even though the linework in the paper scan could be colored and be fine as-is, I like to clean up and redraw areas that may be a bit wobbly.

And after a bit of paint, we got ourselves a pretty nifty ne'er-do-well on our hands!

I hope you enjoyed this little glimpse into some of the ways characters develop and evolve during the design process! Let's get cracking and see if we can get this fearsome foe to move around and join in the fight sometime soon!