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Recent Work

The Neon Guys

star man character illustration steven gerdts

The Neon Guys are from a series I worked on in the beginning of 2018. After learning how other artists use reference photos, I began finding stock photos, heavily changing them in Photoshop, and using the new, unrealistic bodies as references. I was essentially turning photos of normal people into comic book style bodies.

This graphic shows the difference in height and width between normal, idealistic, fashion and heroic body types.

Source: http://webcomicalliance.com/featured-news/anatomy-101/


From Artwork to a Character Design

II finished that project awhile ago, but I decided these should be animated like my other characters. In trying to bring these characters into a more straight forward view, I was able to use the same Photoshop brushes and coloring technique that I used to make the original art. I made three different versions.

The cool thing is that with these three different hairstyles, I can make lots of different versions of enemies in an animated scene by recoloring, swapping out heads, and stretching the bodies to make individuals a little taller or shorter. With all of this variety, I can also make different weapons or fighting styles for different colors to allow you to know how they’ll fight at a glance.

star person character art steven gerdts
character concept star man steven gerdts
star men character art steven gerdts

starman character artist steven gerdts

The Source Art will Inform Personality, Movement, and Special Effects

I love the process of making the originals, and these are pretty fun, too. I think that these will be rewarding to animate. I’m already planning out ways to have the colors flicker in addition to their other movements. I think it will require me to create separate After Effects compositions for each frame, planning out the flickering in each before using those to create some movement, but a run cycle will probably be complicated!

I want to utilize grids of particles for their special attacks and abilities, too.