Mascot Ideas

So busy recently and a lot of things up in the air after moving, been a crazy few months! However I found this sketch from a while back and thought it looked cool. I did these when asked to come up with some ideas for a football/soccer mascot. Quite a few things wrong with these but a good starting point and push them as a 3D sculpt in the future.

The mascot had to be strong in physical appearance to intimidate the opposition, but also have an appeal to young fans. They were created in SketchBook Pro initially and then taken into Painter for line work and colouring. I worked on a range of expressions for each concept. However these 3 concepts and the initial brief were dropped in favour of the 'Star' concept which was created later. You can see the final concept and design HERE at the bottom of the page. There are also more characters complete with development sketches in the link... Hope you find it useful.

Cyborg paint over

Cyborg paint over

One of the things I find interesting as an exercise is to listen to movies for inspiration. Movies can give a very strong visual cues for artwork, we see this all the time with fan art. I've got nothing against fan art of course, but what I like to experiment with are the more subtle cues from the movie dialogue itself.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. I'm not quoting word for word here (there are many that can I'm sure) but in the original Terminator movie the character Reese explains to Sarah Conner about the Terminator. He explains to her that underneath the skin there is a heavily armoured combat chassis and we finally get to see it later in the movie. The key word for me here is chassis,  because it has interesting connotations when thinking about design. The Terminator has an endoskeleton chassis. My sketch was based on an exoskeleton and the thought of this cyborg hunting a person down with this aggressive, light-weight chassis was interesting. The lack of emotion is helped by reducing the head to something without facial detail or expression.

There are elements in my design of course which are lifted directly from Stan Winston's superb Predator (the shoulder mounted tracking weapon) and again the lack of facial details which I explained in my earlier post being West World inspired. The left arm shows some skin to remind the viewer of the human parts used when this cyborg was created.

So the technique here is very simple, I used a photograph as reference for the pose and did a paint over job to explain the concept of the chassis. It's only at a development stage, but I have enough information in this sketch to take it forward. The goal is to create a 3D model in LightWave 3D and create a final render. Hope you found it interesting.