Brother Monkey – Love the world

That’s a working title, I’m not exactly sure what I am going to end calling my game, so if you have any great suggestions please do let me know.

As promised, here is a post about the development of my main character and hero of my game, Brother Monkey. Anyone who knows my family, know who Brother Monkey actually is, but for those who don’t, he is my daughter’s favourite toy, some might say, her one true love. She has said in the past “I’m not going to get married Mama, I’m going to live alone with Brother Monkey!” (We believe her!)

I did lots of googling on anime eyes and discovered a style called Chibi, I really liked the simplistic approach so I decided to try drawing that myself.

I started by doing a lot of different sketches of Brother Monkey, trying to get a feel for the direction the artwork for my game was going to take. I’ve included a few of my initial sketches. I had an idea that I wanted my characters to have anime style eyes to use as different expressions so I had a starting point of sorts.

I imported my images into Photoshop and then used my Wacom pen to styles the miniature Brother Monkeys I had created. The next step was vectorising my monkey so I skipped over to Illustrator to start work on that. It didn’t take long for me to realise that I wasn’t quite heading in the right direction.

Moodboard

After awhile I started to go around in circles, thankfully soon after this my husband sent me a link to some gif’s by Eran Mendel, an Animation director and designer and I immediately fell in love with his style.

With this style in mind, I went back to the drawing board and came up with an idea for my monkey. After playing around with this style in Illustrator and keeping in mind how small my character would be I decided to stick with the chibi style eyes rather than use the plain eyes in Eran’s Style.

After this, the process sped up some, but still took the time to work out proportions and create Brother Monkey’s backpack.

After three days of working on this, I have come up with the following character concept art.

Stayed tuned for the next step, I still have lots more work to do!