Earlier this year, I started a redesign of my oldest character – Astēr. I created two front-on images, that refined some details I had established in a previous illustration. I created a character sheet for Artfight that elaborated on these ideas and finalized a new design.
The initial layout I came up with had two front and two back shots – one with and one without the helmet for each.
I also reserved a section for details, and ended up creating a new pet character to accompany the astronaut.
The silhouette is more feminine than the original, and I made the shape more structured. I included the character sheet from when I was 16 first creating and animating the character.
I established a collar, since previously the design did not have an official helmet-less version, and removed the front of the pack (technically I moved it to the back and removed the back one but thats semantics).
I made the legs more structured, drew actual boots since 15-year-old me didn’t know how to draw them, and gave the shoulders more of a pointed shoulder-pad look. I made the structure of the torso stronger, pulling a bit from Astroneer’s character design, and made the helmet a bit softer shaped, rather than being so helmet-visor-helmet.
I had been drawing the antenna since the beginning of the character design, but none of the previous references had included it, but I decided to make it a permanent part of the design to increase the overall whimsy of the character.
I refined the line art across all the components and followed it up with flat colors and details.
Okay – it’s time to talk about the new character here – Needle the cosmossum (cosmo-opposum)
I started out thinking I was going to design a Laika-esq space dog, but after doodling some concepts, I ended up falling in love with the pointy nosed creature I created. My friend Mango Diaczynsky (mangopoli on Artfight) came up with the name needle, and recommended replacing my initial worm-on-a-string toy doodle with a fizzy radioactive shrimp. The toy would be swappable with any other silly cat toy or random trash.
The shape is intentionally bean-like, with silly useless legs sticking out of the bottom and a long flexible tail. I slapped a little antenna at the bottom both to match Astēr and to bring some red to the design outside of the cat toy. I also put the same style backpack on him that I did on Astēr and made the puffy helmet connector reminiscent of their old design, especially with the stripes and circles.
Finally I put on some finishing details in the form of refined and colored lines, and a few extra notes about what colors go there for the sake of the next artist.
Overall this redesign was long overdue, and I’m happy that Artfight gave me a deadline to do it.