All of these characters were pretty much like Redmau5: already a recognizable mascot that I didn't want to stray too far away from, but at the same time add a bit of my style to them. Here's some info on my thought process in creating their designs:
Stranger (derives from Danger)
- The toughest part about designing Stranger was choosing his outfit. I looked up several of Danger's outfits (from when he DJs to album covers), so I mixed a bit of everything into this final design.
- Danger reminded me of Spiderman, or some kind of dark superhero. I went with a dynamic pose to communicate that.
Nom Nom (Feed Me)
- The little green gremlin (?) is often seen with other creatures or amorphous, colorful things with it, (at least as far as album covers go) so the concept I came up for Nom Nom was that it can shapeshift or create little blob creatures from his body.
Zombleman (Zomboy)
- This was an easy concept, as the first thing that came to me was changing "boy" in "Zomboy" to "man". To add more flair, I went with a gentleman appearance, because being dapper is awesome.
Giga Rexcision (Excision)
- When I designed SkriRex (in the previous batch of characters), I forgot that Excision was the designated "dinosaur of electronic music". To make up for that mistake, I had to include him in this second batch.
- The design for this character is based off of Excision's Shambhala 2011 Dubstep Mix album cover. Originally, Giga Rexcision had the tiny T-rex arms but I got rid of them in exchange for the double cannons on his hips, to emphasize Excision's heavy sound.
ASOT 9001 (ASOT, A State of Trance, Armin van Buuren)
- After looking at all the characters I'd come up with thus far, trance was missing. I'm not too familiar with many trance artists, and there didn't seem to be any notable features or mascots I could use from the individual artists that I knew. I knew about ASOT, and their little characters were perfect for inspiration.
- The ASOT characters don't look menacing or harmful, but I wanted to give this one a sense that it could kick your ass if it wanted to (plus make it look like it fits with the rest of the characters in this project). The colorful "wings" on it's side can float around it in many different ways and can also be used as blades. The colors represent this.
I don't listen to some of the artists in this batch of characters often, so I tried to get a good feel of their music by doing some Youtube research. I hope I did them justice...
Now that there are 10 characters to this project, onward to a practice exercise! Hint: It's game based.
