New Character Reveal!

Last week I wrote about the new personal project I've started working on and told you that I'd be dedicating most of my blog posts to it over the coming weeks, revealing some new characters this month, so here's the first human character I have to show you!

Because the landscape in this world is basically Earth shattered into millions of pieces which has resulted in a ton of floating islands, I really wanted to think about how the characters (especially the humans) would get around. There will be vehicles, lots of off roading type vehicles so for instance quads and motorbikes which will have lots of modifications to ensure they can drop and jump great heights without falling apart on impact. But what about those who don't have vehicles? That's where this guy comes in!

I remember watching the special features for The Hunger Games Mockingjay Part 1 where the district who are all lumberjacks are acting out their scene of escaping the Capitol's guards, and the way that they escape is by climbing up trees with a lot of speed because they all have these gloves on which are equipped with spikes on the palms to dig into the tree trunk and make it easier to scale. I always knew I wanted to use it for a character and this guy is perfect. He gets higher by climbing with his suit (the blades coming out of his wrists also act as a sort of ice pick style apparatus), and he gets to the lower ground by gliding with his wing suit.

When I started sketching this character up, I was trying to work on improving facial expressions and I really enjoy drawing with a bit of humor, so I decided to try out some funny faces. When I drew up the face he's pulling in the bottom right pose of the character sheet I could see a personality starting to come out, I wanted him to be one of the good guys, but he's a bit of a rebel, he doesn't really care for safety and wants to explore and live how he wants to, not thinking about how safe it is. Now, if you haven't seen Mad Max Fury Road (you should), you'll know that in one of the scenes when Furiosa begins to drive a different way to escape, all of the gangs signal each other by shooting up coloured sort of flares/smoke. So I thought it would work well for this guy if he has the same kind of mechanism so that when he's gliding people and creatures can see him coming. He has a little clip on the back of his boots where he can just switch out canisters of what will be a substance obtained from glow in the dark creatures and plants.

Another thing that REALLY inspired me was the bad guys in the Hero short for Overwatch. They all have skulls painted on their face and when all of the town goes dark the paint glows and it looks amazing! I know that I want to have groups of the same types of humans in this world, so for instance this guy won't be the only one with a wing glider to get around, there will be a whole crew of them. However they will obviously have their own different features, maybe one is way taller and bulkier and has a different type of armor and body paint colour. I also thought the glow in the dark element would look super cool at night. As for his armor, it's made from the shells of the species I posted last week! 

I hope you are enjoying seeing these new pieces and the insights to what inspired them! I'll be posting another post on it next week with either a new character or possibly going into more depth about the world itself with some environmental sketches. If you would like to see one rather than the other feel free to let me know on Twitter @aldersaur !

Thanks for reading!