Jurjen's world

A while ago Nita (someone I know from myOpera, but has now moved her cool blog the Army of Rabbits to elsewhere) told me about some project by Pictoplasma: The missing link. The idea was to design a hairy furry character aka Yeti, Sasquatch, or whatever. They are going to use the entries to research how people look to these mysterious creatures and going to present the results in La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris. I have to admit the story about what they actually going to do with it is a bit vague to me. But who cares, I liked the idea to design a hairy character, so I did.

Here is what I came up with:


I drawn the creature with pencil on paper, scanned it and coloured it digitally.

So maybe you are wondering how I came up with the idea of this character. Or maybe not, but still I'm going to tell you! My first thought of a Yeti was that its all hairy and cute, but at the same time it is also a big monster. Like a sweet monster. So I thought it should have some kind of cuteness but also some angriness in it. So I started sketching a bit and playing with some idea's. I came up with something I kind of liked so I made sketch with some more details. But that didn't turn out like I wanted at all. It looked like the guy was covered in leaves instead of hair!


Then I decided to try more straight and long hair, and I created this guy:


And interesting guy, but in fact not what I was looking for. Where is the monster? Where is the cuteness? Both not there. And I wasn't all to happy about the style neither.

After some thinking about my next try in this design, I remembered some sketches I made a while ago of some fox, a 'fierce fox' to be more precise! That fox had quite some hair, so I realized I could perhaps get something out of those sketches. I looked it up, here it is:


You might recognize on the bottom left Taylor Tails from Sonic. That was the inspiration for that Fierce Fox. Altogether there where quite a few things I could use from these sketches on the right. The beard, the angry eyes, the lock of hair at the top. So I decided to continue this way.

However I thought this Yeti should be fatter, and his nose should be more human like, or perhaps monkey like. Why the nose? Because else it kinda looks like a bear or some other animal. I think a Yeti should have more human like features. So that's how I came up with this final character.

Here's another sketch of it, a little bit slimmer. Fatter look better, right?

This one is all traditional pencil on paper.

Altogether I had a lot of fun with this.