Character concept: moth guy!

So, even though this is by and large a blog about 3D work, we're going to throw our mission statement out the window for this very first post, which will be be a brief chronicle of a character concept I did for a gig in the not-so-distant past. The assignment: design some funny monster characters for a show pitch.

For one of the characters I decided to go with an insect-meets-human hybrid. Now, this was for a comedy, so I needed an insect that had comedy potential. Anyone who's read The Tick knows that the moth certainly has comic potential. I decided to start there.

I did some initial rough sketches, stuff that eventually began to looked like this:

There were elements I liked in these first sketches, so for the next pass I focused on refining those likeable elements while also searching for new ones:

Adding the extra set of arms really helped sell him for me. I figured we could get some great comic acting out of somebody with two sets of arms.

Eventually you have to start thinking about color:

One more pass to tighten the color palette and put him in an action pose:

One last thing: I wanted to drop him into some sort of scene, just to see how he would settle into it. There was no BG art yet done that I could use, but I knew that the show was set in a very mundane, present-day American Anytown. So I put him in the most mundane place I could think of:

Unfortunately, this was to be moth guy's first and last excursion to Home Depot; the whole project was shelved shortly after I made this image. C'est l'animation!