Street Wars

This has been a personal design project for me for the last year or so. I'm thinking of it as a very loose framework of an idea for a video game to just give me some direction and help design choices.
Inspiration for it is very eclectic and includes things like street fashion, the Blood Brothers (the song Streetwars/Exotic Foxholes and others on the Young Machetes album), weapons from around the late seventies to preset day, urban decay and whatever random things cross my mind...

I've been designing character classes in pairs of male and female. The idea is that it would be a co-op game something like Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, where a dude can play with his wife or girlfriend, you get to upgrade your character with cool weapons and tactical stuff and your better half has fun dressing hers up in funky clothes.

It's been a really self indulgent project as far as design choices go, so it's not necessarily going to make sense or appeal to everyone...trying to do that is my day job.

Anyway, here's the latest characters. Some resistance characters inspired by the Black Panther party in the 60s, and a bit of the Blacksploitation movies from the 70s like Superfly.



and the characters I've done so far for some context.

DeathDiscoDancePunk

Another random idea...the girl's outfit was inspired by a VICE DO, and for some reason I thought she should be 80s dancing with a skeleton.

Some Touch Ups

Just a couple of pieces from last year that I wanted to touch up.

This one I did last September, I thought it was missing some final touches, so I went back and added some texture to the robot, made the girl's eyes less buggy, made the windmill thingy in the background a bit more apparent and added more colour to the flowers.



And one I started around November I think. Added texture and tweaked some values...

Monster Pack

Here's a character I finished up from an old sketch last weekend. It was a pretty quick one, maybe 4 hours altogether.



and the sketch for it...

Aether Machine - about context

So, here's one that I had an initial idea for about a month ago... a koji morimoto inspired girl inhaling out of a steampunk/vintage gas pump inspired Aether vending machine. I ended up just scanning a thumbnail and doing about a 4-5 hour colour pass on it.
I think I learned a little something about context with this one. I wasn't motivated to finish my initial thumbnail until I thought about placing the girl and machine in a distopic future city with acid rain and the whole blade runner feel to it...
I'm all for random ideas, but I guess it's good to do a little more storytelling and put things in context sometimes, it seemed to help this come together for me.