The Neon Guys
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.
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.