Poppymon

Reminiscing a bit about Digimon with some friends, it got me thinking about how neat the Armor Digi-volutions were as an expansion of the "digital evolution" concept of the show. And then I thought it'd be really funny to come up with armor evolutions of some of my own OCs. To be honest, I don't really have that many "creature" designs, as monsters haven't been a big focus of my creativity for a long while.

To keep it simple, I went with Poppy, since she's become one of my go-to doodle characters. Mogie might have been a better, and more classic, example, but his overly simple design kinda made it hard to figure out how to add sufficient details while keeping him looking like Mogie.

Digimon, as opposed to Pokemon, often had what felt like a fairly ramshackle evolutionary tree, with the creatures various stages as often not even resembling their base forms except by a barest stretch of theme. Gatomon: starts as a blob (as most do), then becomes a puppy, then a bipedal cat, then a humanoid angel, then a heavenly dragon. Auguman's forms at least looked like variations of the same orange dinosaur.

Anyway, for the Armor Evolutions, I wanted to maintain a theme of "armor" wherein the resulting evolution is clearly the original creature, modified in various ways by the Digi-Egg attributes. There aren't actually that many examples of the Armors in the show, or on expanded media. There's one chart that shows possible variations that I think were used on expanded media, and from there, I tried to spot cohesive visual themes to base Poppy's forms on. For example, I noticed the "Hope" evolutions were all horned creatures as their common trait, so I give Poppy some Jackalope horns. A few forms, though, I just based them more directly on the armor style of the Digimon from the show, for lack of a better idea.

Anyway, this was a fun little experiment! Almost makes me want to rip off the idea and do a whole art series of stuff like this! Almost. :B

Oh, I also realized it's October, so I guess this can also serve as this years Halloween piece! Spoopymon!

More Sketches

  

Poppy and Margot in the Caves

 

Poppy the... Hedgehog?

 

Happy Halloween? Poppy doing Knuckles the Echidna cosplay. Even the furries are becoming furries!

Poppy Update

 

Decided Poppy looked a little too much like Mickey Mouse, so I decided to update her model a bit to resemble more of a jerboa. Still not totally sure what her deal is, and I've been trying, and not really succeeding, to design similar doodle-critter-characters to have her interact with. I have a vague idea she could be a "Litlin", one of several species of diminuitive demihumans who live in a world where "giants" (normal people) once ruled the Earth, but had mysteriously vanished years ago, leaving Litlins to navigate a suddenly vast and empty world. Or maybe she's a human-sized knight errant. Or maybe just a farmer caught up in shenanigans. Who knows? Likely, if I don't come up with something specific for her soon, she'll join the massive pile of other characters I came up with for something, then never followed through.

Update: More Poppys

Poppy

 

Attempting to design some simplistic toons for more animating. So here's a new adventurer demihuman girl. No idea what's up with her yet. We shall see as her escapades unfold!

(first version)

(slight FPS edit)

And here's a little animation of her! Putting up two versions, as I can't decide which speed works best for the final moment of the clip. Meant to do something longer, but I got distracted by other things. Definitely need a lot of work on model consistency, but some of that is me rushin' to get some proof of concept done today. Not sold on her color pallet yet, or general design, but maybe I can tweak it more.

I find myself already hitting hard technical limitations on Fresco; pathing is way less useful than I thought it might be for little background elements, and moreover, there's a hard FPS cap; I wanted to have the clouds slowly and consistently move across the sky, but they kept going too fast and I couldn't line up the loop consistently. Looping the ground was also a tremendous pain to line up properly and still couldn't help but get glitched.

Fresco and Procreate are good for cute little looping gifs, but I think I'm going to have to upgrade to Krita or Blender sooner rather than later. Assuming my interest actually stick around longer than another week.

More Procreate Sketches

I've really fallen off of even trying to do "completed", full pictures in favor of just doing rough sketches when the mood takes me. It's good in some respects in that it does get me to draw more. But I haven't really been "applying" that to a more full-effort artwork. Oh, well. Every little bit counts, I guess.

The Hippo Guy is Rock Fueler from the "classic newspaper strip" style Mickey Mouse comic Zombie Coffee.

Lunchtime Doodles

 

Back to Procreate, occasionally doodling during my lunch breaks at work. Had a hard time with the program when I first used it, but I've gotten more used to it. Finnicky bits aside, it does have some nice brushes.