Monday, March 7, 2011

Hard Boyle'd Christmas Minion

This is a character study for a personal project that I've been working on for a while now. For those of you not familiar with Gruss Vom Krampus: in some European countries he is Saint Nick's demonic little helper. He's the one who doles out the punishment for all the bad children at Christmas time, poking them with his pitchfork, whipping them with a switch of hay, locking them up in chains, and stuffing them in a basket to take them down to Hell. AND he steals their presents and replaces them with potatoes. (Those European parents really want to instill pure fear into the hearts of little kids!) I find this mythology completely fascinating, and I'm incorporating him into an animated story that I'm doing. Usually he looks like your typical Halloween devil. But in one old postcard that I came across, he was wearing a blazer and short trousers, and I like the idea of a somewhat sophisticated Krampus as opposed to just an evil goblin. So that's the way I went with him. And I needed to make him a little more kid friendly, so he ended up looking like a cross between Nightcrawler from the X-Men, The Count from Sesame Street, and Malificent from Sleeping Beauty. I'm pretty happy with this design, and I'm pretty sure what I use for my story will be close to this, if not this exact design.
Here is the blue line sketch and the color rough:

1 comment:

  1. This is brilliant!!! I love the style, real nice character :)

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