Friday, May 29, 2015

Illustration Friday: Ninja Mummy

Illustration Friday: Every Friday a word is given on the website, IllustrationFriday.com. Artists and illustrators then submit an image that represents that word all during the week.
This week's word: MONSTER

This is a word of the week that I can really enjoy! So many monsters!

This was a sketch I had originally created around Halloween 2014. It was going to be an ordinary dancing mummy, but I stopped drawing it after doing the top half of it's body and put it aside for several days.

When I went back to finishing the sketch, I saw the character in a new light. The pose looked more like a martial artist stance, so I started to give the dancing mummy some ninja clothing.

The Ninja Mummy fighting in a sand storm

I started to imagine how this character would animate since its a contradiction of two movement styles:
A.) the fluidly smooth, silent and quick reflexes of a ninja, mixed with
B.) the awkwardly slow, stumbling and limbering motions of a mummy.
Merging the two styles, I'd picture he'd be a quick and skilled martial artist, but he would often spastically twitch uncontrollably, groaning and create nontraditional (but humorous) fighting poses.

The original pencil sketch that was going to be a dancing mummy . . .