Shenanigans & Tomfoolery

Fantastic Four Redesign

Allow me to be a little introspective for a bit.

This might take a while.

I don’t consider myself a character designer. I’m not saying I’m a good or a bad character designer, I just mean to say that I don’t consider it to be one of my strengths. So when Project Rooftop announced their Fantastic Four redesign contest, I had no idea where to begin and I decided not to enter. With the Future Foundation stuff, I think Marko Djurdjevic pretty much designed the perfect costumes for a modern FF and I just didn’t see how I could compete with that.

But on one of those sleepless nights, I kinda started to see how I could break up these costumes into smaller shapes in somewhat interesting ways. I got out of bed, threw these ideas on paper (or on a Photoshop canvas rather), started to like what I saw and I decided to give it a shot. Because I design mostly on the page (see? this isn’t what a good character designer does!), I roughly laid out what the look of the suits would be and played with colors and stuff and, once I had a good idea of where I was headed, I laid out a second drawing which would be the finished piece I would use to present my redesigns for the contest. I always try to use horizontal compositions whenever I can and, with four characters, it made sense to use one here.

Therein laid my problem.

Once I was well into penciling, I realized that most redesign contests require a full body shot because, you know, you want to see the full costume you’re judging. My composition didn’t have that, the characters where mostly just from the waist up. If I had gone with a vertical composition this probably wouldn’t have happened. So I was left with a choice: a) I could dump the drawing I was doing (which had a composition I was slowly becoming attached to) in favor of a more stiff, character design piece so I could enter the contest, or b) continue doing a full-on illustration where the Fantastic Four just happened to have different costumes and not enter.

I opted for the latter and said bye-bye to Project Rooftop.

Maybe next time.

Posted on August 07, 2012 in Comics, Illustration |