I’ve been pretty unmotivated lately in terms of creating real time characters, but my friend Satoshi convinced me to participate in Game Artisan’s Comicon Challenge. This year the theme seemed pretty interesting:

“This year’s theme for 3D Character Artists and 2D Concept Artists is “Alternate Universe.” You can either change the time period of your comic book hero or his/her gender. For instance you can make a 1842 Western styled Captain America (cowboy) OR a female Captain America OR you can do both – an 1842 western-styled (cowboy/girl) female Captain America. If you decide to mix and match, it’s your choice!”

I had a difficult time coming up with something I REALLY wanted to do since most of the obvious choices were already taken. I did some searching and I found something with potential. Before Neil Gaiman got a hold of the Sandman as we know him today, he used to be a Golden Age comic book hero with a really simple aesthetic and something I really like…a gas mask!

Here is the wikipedia entry on The Sandman

I decided to use a similar time period (1940’s) but change his gender and make a sexy femme fatale equivalent.

I just started so here are some work in progress images of what I have going so far. I’ll be updating this blog with entries whenever I make some significant progress. The base mesh was created in Zbrush using Zspheres and all the other pieces started off as simple primatives in Maya which were imported using GoZ.

Early Character Turns

Mask Detail

Inspiration Sheet

Quick Paint-Over

You can follow my progress in my thread on Game Artisans

Feel free to leave any comments or critiques!

Quick update I made the other night: