Korzaz, Destroyer of Armstrong

Hello Again,

As I’m sure you have already heard, I have changed my 20-time project to *drum roll* Character Design! I have decided to do something similar to the second idea I had in the 'What This Blog is About (Part 2)' ’ post where I would learn new styles of drawing characters and then create some of my own characters. 

I’ve mostly been designing characters in my own style for now, like this war hammer orc who has killed Neil Armstrong and took his spacesuit on the moon. I got the idea for this character after John told me about his project, painting Warhammer miniatures. He talked about this one set of orcs he created with his friends and referred to them as ‘space orcs’ and that just gave me an instant vision of what I needed to draw. I started by looking up pictures of Warhammer orks and trying to nail down their key features that I would need to include with the drawing. I found that the big teeth and the snarling expression were definitely something I needed to incorporate into my design. I then looked up pictures of the Apollo moon mission spacesuit that Neil Armstrong would have worn and looked for some key features there. I ended up with this crazy snaggle-toothed orc wearing the classic astronaut space helmet with the visor flipped up to show his face. I gave him a mix of both orcish armours with cobbled together breastplates and shabby-looking gauntlets and the kind of spacesuit that Armstrong would have worn on the moon mission. I put various rips and tears in the suit to indicate some sort of battle and a small ‘Neil Armstrong’ patch in the right shoulder. And no space orc is truly complete without a giant sci-fi gun slung over his shoulder. I had a lot of fun creating this character. I hope I can have these kinds of instant inspiration in the future.

The other way I’ve been getting inspiration from is randomly generated character traits. I used a kind of site like this, where you can just press a button and get various physical and character traits then create the kind of character I would think of when I saw these traits. The character I created using this method was a male giant who is cute, gentle, a young adult, and wields energy orbs as a weapon. I’m pretty proud of this guy, he’s nothing special and just drawn in my style but I think I achieved the traits I was supposed to.

I have found a couple of styles that I think I want to emulate going forward with this presentation. Zac’s project is about creating a lo-fi hip hop song and the lo-fi hip hop mascot is the anime girl on the 24/7 live stream of lo-fi hip hop. So I want to create a mascot for Zac’s song in the same kind of anime style. I was thinking of following a tutorial like this but putting my own spin on it, maybe make it look like Zac? I’m not sure yet.

Overall I’m very happy with what this project is turning into and very excited for future characters that I will create. Until next time, Character Design-time