Pirate, Spaceman, Cowboy, Knight

A Pirate, a Spaceman, a Cowboy, and a Knight all walk into a bar...or into some new designs. In a Plotmasters type exercise, I took an old drawing and tried to improve on both the artwork & the concept as a whole. I have no intention of developing this beyond a nostalgia trip and re-design exercise. You can see the results to the left, but in this post I'll explore where they came from and the process in revamping them.

In 1999 or 2000 I drew the piece on the right as well as a list of characters for the idea. In true Plotmasters fashion, the characters were clearly myself, Jesse Glenn, and the others would be based on the usual friends of mine that provided inspiration. I was clearly in my 'emulate Mignola' phase when I drew the Pirate and the Spaceman.

The overall idea was for a group of mis-matched characters to go on adventures together––and when I say mismatched, I mean in the same way a kid might team up action figures and toys from very different toy lines and in very different genres and scales. 

Sound Familiar? Toy Story, right? Well––it does match that franchise, and I did draw the original two as well as my list well after the first movie was out. But, instead I was influenced by an episode of The Twilight Zone called "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" where archetypal characters are stuck in a cylinder with no memory of how they got there only to find out they are toys in a Christmas donation barrel. And instead of a Soldier, a Hobo, a Bagpiper, a Clown, and a Dancer, I went with toy genres that were popular when I was a kid, but also seemed timeless.

And I have to admit, even in the re-designs, I couldn't get away from Toy Story, and so I leaned into it. My first step for the re-design was to draw the characters that had already been visualized, but this time to play with proportions to make them more stylized and toy-like.

I pushed the horizontal of the Pirate, making him low and squat, with the only vertical height being given by the ostentatiousness of his feather and sword. The Spaceman I wanted to push into a shape beyond what a human could wear as a costume and embrace a design of something more futuristic...though I think the design borrows a lot from Lego Space sets and Gizmo Duck.

To keep this exercise simple, I opted to ink them large and with a brush pen––focusing on the overall shapes and concepts and not on details and textures. This was inked on a 12" x 12" piece of Strathmore Bristol.

I remember being torn at this point in the process about the characters as toys vs characters inspired by toys Toy Story/Twilight Zone issue. And I wish I'd included a base plate (like on plastic army men) on the Pirate's foot & peg to make him much more obviously a toy.

I then scanned the inks and colored them in Photoshop. Rather than my normal Mouse Guard style of coloring, I went back to a technique I did on a Plotmasters episode for 'Hero Squad'. 

For this process each character is colored with flat base colors. Then a layer is placed above that set to 'multiply' and a pale purple is used to paint in flat shadows––same process but a layer set to 'screen' to create highlights. The last steps were to add color holds to the Spaceman's logo and face and a crinkled paper background to the duo to project the feel of this being part of a kid's imagination.

Written on the original drawing were two additional characters (I'm sure I was even considering more, but stopped at 4 in total): Cowboy & Knight. The trick with doing a modern drawing of a friendly toy cowboy is how to avoid Woody from Toy Story. I really leaned in to the toy-object idea and made his head and body wood block, his arms and legs rope and his hair and mustache yarn. 

The Knight I decided could be a material opposite to armor and made him a knitted plush. The cowboy design is based on my college friend Seyth––the Knight I don't know––perhaps Nick (see Cats Trio, Dragons, or R-Wars).

Like the others, I inked these on 12' x 12" Strathmore bristol with a brush pen. I like how they tall gangly Cowboy and short squat Knight shapes echo the first two re-designs of the Pirate and Spaceman.

I did worry that I was going to have to do more detail on these compared to the others just to get the materials of the yarn & rope across. Being aware of that helped me me better about not going down a rabbit hole of texture and detail and to just limit it to define basic forms and imply materials.

I think it's fun to imagine that while the previous two characters were store bought, these two toys were hand-made for the child, or that the cowboy especially was an older broken toy with knotted rope used to replace missing pieces.

The coloring process was the same as before, but this time I had a harder time choosing the base colors. There's a long tradition of me-characters being red and Jesse characters being blue. 

I know Seyth's favorite color is green, but how to make that work as Cowboy attire (when I so dearly wanted that bandanna to be red) took some subtle adjustments until I got something that worked. For the knight I just used Yellow & Orange to round out a Primary + Green scheme. I like that it makes the Knight look even a little more cautious and timid rather than the association of bravery with a knight.

Here again are the quartet together––just drawn for fun as an exercise. 

Where I think this idea could still work and differentiate itself from something like Toy Story or the Twilight Zone episode is for the characters-as-characters to exist only in the imagination of the child. Unlike Toy Story where the toys really are alive, these would be inanimate toys, but ones where the child living through some kind of distress (anything ranging from detention or being grounded to dealing with a terminal illness or an abusive parent) uses the toys as talismans and imagines the things they do that help the child navigate emotionally through the situation.

*PS*
Another idea of how to use these characters/designs would be in a co-operative video game set in a house (bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen, etc) where each player can control one of the toys. They can pair up to accomplish special moves (the pirate can be hooked on to the cowboy's lasso and be thrown up to a higher location, the knight can ride the spaceman to joust objects out of the way, etc) each character would have their own pros and cons (the pirate walks slow, but has good reach with the sword, the spaceman is fast but makes the most noise, the knight is squishy and can fall without taking damage, etc.