Pikachu Used... EDM Arena!!!

Due to the interest the "Pikachu Used Thundershock" characters received, I felt obligated to create this teaser poster of a would be fighting game called EDM Arena. If you haven't seen the characters, you can find them here.

As for the creation of this poster... it took a while. It's layout is based off the Ultra Music Festival posters. The most challenging parts of creating this piece were designing the game title logo and balancing the colour and contrast of all the characters plus the background.

Maybe there'll be some screenshots of this game later...

Process Log 18: Motherframe ZELDA

I participated in another CGHub challenge and the topic was to re-imagine The Legend of Zelda universe. I like sci-fi, so I went with a sci-fi spin...

I originally thought of Zelda in futuristic garb but then I got this idea of her hair being made of electrical tubes or something. A quick backstory came to mind: in this futuristic age of Hyrule, "ZELDA" is the name of the main computer frame at Hyrule Castle that overlooks the whole kingdom/city. Her hair tubes keep her plugged into the system and this is when she's at her strongest, power-wise, however, she can unplug herself with the expense of weakening her energy. When she goes mysteriously missing (or Ganondorf captures her, whatever) her memory is implanted into a proxy unit called "Sheik". The suit helps maintain her energy, even if she's miles away from Hyrule Castle.

So getting to painting the final image, I initially wanted to paint both Zelda and Sheik at the same time, but this concept was too difficult to execute without confusing the hell out of the viewer. In this first WIP shot, I liked the pose and the holographic lyre attached to her left arm, but the rest of the concept had to change...

...and so this is the final. I simplified the concept by just sticking to Zelda, who had the stronger visual design in the exploratory sketches compared to Sheik. I geeked out a bit on the details on the upper half of her body...

What I learned/experienced:
The tricky part of this character was to balance the recognition of the original character design with the re-imagining. For Zelda, I focused on keeping her key features: pointy ears, colours, hair style, and that long cloth thing that she wears over her dress while redesigning everything else around them.

"Pikachu Used Thundershock" 2

Continuing with the characters of "Pikachu Used Thundershock" electronic music playlist, I made a second batch of peeps based on electronic musicians. For the first batch of characters, go here.

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.