Working on some more character design concepts for the main trio of this project in the works. I was fairly happy with the scarecrow fox and was trying to make sure the other two matched his look, but I'm not 100% settled on any of them yet.

For the little robo dog, I began with a very literal interpretation of a futuristic/cyborg dog as my starting point, then slowly dropped the familiarity and ended up wanting to make it less futuristic. I then took inspiration from power line transmission towers, and wanted to use that type of technology as the 'robotic' component for the design, while still turning it into a dog-like creature. I'm pretty happy with where it ended up, but I think the overall look will need a little more fine-tuning before I'll call it done.

The cat will probably need to be workshopped some more, as they aren't quite...weird enough, to suit the character's purpose?? I wanted to start with a cat as the touchstone, and add in two extra eyes for them to use for seeing into the future and into the past. This character is meant to be anxious and afraid of the amount of constant information they're receiving by always trying to predict/plan for the future, while also constantly dwelling on the past, so I think I'll need to keep working on their look to make them feel much more frazzled than this current version. I'm curious to see how far removed from this iteration the final design will end up being!

I default to making characters that are classically cute, so this is definitely an exercise in pushing the design concept outside of that zone for the sake of the storytelling! But I think the story is worth it, and I don't want my art to end up limiting my ability to tell it.

It feels good to have a character/worldbuilding project again!