I designed some more characters for X-Gamer!

Quite often when you work as a creative, you get to work on really fun projects that you're super excited about but then when they're finished, you can't talk about them for a while, although I will say that X-Gamer never once stopped me from sharing these new characters, I prefer to let my client release them to the public before I share them. So back in August, I got a phone call from one of the guys asking if I was up for working on two new characters for two new flavours with them. If you've been keeping up with my blog this year, you'll know how much I absolutely loved working with them the first time and how proud I was of how the first character turned out (you can read more about it here if not!) So of course I was more than happy to be a part of it again!

I did design two characters, the first of which I'm going to talk about this week, Powacrush, I'll dive into the process behind the second character next week. When X-Gamer initially contact me about Powacrush, he was called something slightly different, but still along the same lines, the idea was that he would be a sort of warrior rhino beast. As I've mentioned before in this blog post it's handy to practise drawing what you'd like to be working on rather than what you think everyone will want to see as it often leads to better work. Well, funnily enough, I'd been doing some study sketches in a morning and about 3 days before I got the phone call from X-Gamer, I'd been doing some Rhino studies, how handy!

Because I had done these and because I like to draw warriors and I'm often inspired by tribes and their clothing I pretty much had everything that I needed to get sketching some ideas! So we threw some moodboards and images back and forth, and it was one of those where I definitely had a really solid idea in my head, and having working with the awesome X-Gamer guys before, I had a good idea of what they were looking for. So I drew up a sketch and although it's pretty rough he was definitely in the right direction.

The guys were happy with him, however they did make a comment on how his shoulder pads especially were making him look like Rocksteady, I've never been into TMNT so it was purely coincidence but obviously needed to be fixed! An idea that they came up with was to incorporate more of the pineapple (which is the flavour of drink he represents for the brand) into his appearance. So that's what I focused on next, along with developing 3 different poses for him.

As you can see, my sketches aren't always spot on and although the first one is pretty much what I wanted, the other two get the idea across, but need a few adjustments to shape etc. In the sketches stage, my attention to detail varies, as long as I can get the idea across, because at the end of the day, the client is paying you for your time, so the more time that can be put into the more important parts the better. There's no spent spending 3 hours on a drawing when you could've got the same idea across with a 10 minute sketch of some shapes! You can start to also see in these sketches a few changes such as his shoulder pads and his tattoo, which I adjusted to match the flow of his powerful hammer when he swings it.

On to the finished character and his poses!

As you can see, the more I worked on him throughout the line work stage, the more he was developed which is often the case when I'm working on something as it's when I can see all of the pieces coming together. So he's got a pretty sweet pendant round his neck, spiky shoulder pads, pineapple textured arm guards, and I even managed to sneak a few X's in the for X-Gamer. We also decided to add a little colour to these, which I think worked well as it really made parts of the character pop, especially his hammer!

I hope you guys liked me sharing the process behind this guy! Next week I'll be sharing some behind the scenes stuff from when I designed the next character, Blue Nitro, so if you like futuristic, hoverboard riding women with blue streaks in their hair, be sure to check back next week! You can follow me on Twitter at @aldersaur (or check the links at the bottom of this page) for regular updates!

If you'd like to know more about X-Gamer, you can find out more on their website where you can currently buy the Zomberry drink. If you're interested in the two new flavours, Powacrush and Blue Nitro head over to this page where you can pre-order them now. You can also get some super cool t-shirts which I also worked on with them, and follow them on twitter @xgamerenergy to enter all sorts of awesome competitions and join a fast growing gaming community, they're really nice guys and so are their fans, so if you're a gamer especially, they're well worth checking out.

Thanks so much for reading guys!