Kick like a kangaroo

A mascot design I did for a failed freelance bid. I figured that I don't have enough mascot-type characters in the portfolio so I threw it into Illustrator and cleaned it up a bit. I think I might finally be starting to get the hang of Illustrator.

Unnamed fantasy creature

A character design that I submitted alongside my bid for a potential job. I ultimately ended up not getting that gig, but I liked the way the character turned out so I polished him up a little and made a turnaround for him.

Romy is short for Romeo. Or Romar. Or Romulo ...

Ever since reading Rafe Bartholomew's Pacific Rims, I've been tossing around the idea of doing something related to Philippine basketball. I've been thinking of character types recently - this one is the cocky hotshot dude who considers himself the king of a particular court. Let's call him ... Romy (?) ... for now.

I had a difficult time nailing down this pose, for some reason. 

'Do you think your Wu-Tang sword can defeat me?"

 

Taking a break from fan art, here's a character built on a cool pose from a Jianshu video I found on youtube. 

筋肉ハイスクール!!

Here are a couple of characters I designed for an animation exercise that I'm planning. Let's call them 'Ray' and 'Warren'.

I found an incredible compilation of fighting animation by Norio Matsumoto on YouTube and felt compelled to attempt a Japanese style animated fight scene. Ray and Warren are based on a couple of my best friends from high school and a little comic I did back then called 'Kinnick Fighter' - 'Kinnick' being the name of our high school. It was the era when Street Fighter mania was sweeping the world and Dragon Ball Z was the must-see cartoon on Japanese TV (yes, I'm quite old) and I thought it would be fun to draw a comic featuring my group of friends engaging in fisticuffs.

No, I will not post samples from it.

Over the years, I've thought about ways to develop it into a series of some sort, with the slightly altered title Kinniku High School (kinniku is Japanese for 'muscle'). But ultimately, I don't think the world needs yet another teenage fighting series.

I've had to shove the exercise to the back burner for a bit while I deal with other things, but I hope to get it going at some point in the near future. For now, Here are some exploratory sketches that eventually led to the designs you see above.

 

P.A.C. Man

I'm one of those cranky old men who will swear up and down that video games were better twenty years ago then they are today, that today's games lack personality, and that the proliferation of first-person shooters spells the death of gaming. I'm also kind of a hypocrite, whose SNES library is composed of mostly Street Fighter clones.

Anyway, so I came up with an idea for a series of illustrations under the theme of "If classic video games were conceived today". These would be ridiculous pictures that would skewer today's games in all of their testosterone-laden, dude-bro-ness. And Pac-Man would be the first. The problem is, I'm having a really hard time making this idea look unappealing.

PAC-Man 2011 would be a first-person-shooter (of course) starring an unarmed space marine who is trapped aboard a ship infested by deadly ghosts. There are weapons hidden in remote corners of the ship that he can use to fend off the ghosts, but ammo is finite. P.A.C., by the way, would stand for "Paranormal Assault Corps" or "Planetary Assault Corps". I can see a legion of dude-bros lining up outside of their local Gamestops already ...