“Star Bandits” Concept Art

It’s funny to call it “concept art.” That sounds so professional. But that’s what it is! I tried out different concepts before I did the main art!

Which is really quite new to me. It’s a new skill I’ve invented.

The thing that’s hard is, you have to let yourself draw ugly.

It feels like nobody else draws ugly, because nobody shares it. That’s why I have huge respect for game dev Toby Fox sharing these early sketches. They look like absolute trash.

Here, I wanted to show off the cool stuff in my sketches, and I resisted the temptation to crop out the uggo. Ta-dah! Enjoy it!

~ ★ ~

“Star Bandits” is a fan fiction about comic strip characters that are already designed. But I wanted to “improve” them – per my personal tastes, anyway. I thought their shapes could be more distinct.

The original designs by Zack Morrison.

I should note some of this is not “my art”; some of the faces I copied straight from Paranatural as study. Like those lovely deranged Stephens on the left.

Suzy is my favorite character. I would explain why, but I already wrote a whole story about it.

For my redesign, I wanted to make her less cute and more ugly-cute. I went with smaller, wider eyes inspired by Ghibli, a big snub nose, and a wide, squat face. I never made a solid decision on how her hair worked. I winged it the whole way.

Somewhere along the way, her iconic sunglasses got lost forever. Apologies… I didn’t feel like dealing with them. I hope the Suzy is still acceptable.

Lisa… turned out to be Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film.

My original plan had more inline illustrations, but once I had the idea to make the ending a comic, that devoured my art budget. The one finished Lisa illustration didn’t make it into the actual zine; I added it to the website version later.

Lisa’s key feature is her hooded eyes. She has to look deceptively sleepy. I took her in an artsy-elegant direction, giving the eyelids dark makeup, making her three lower eyelashes a constant feature, and giving her the dotted eyebrows that I remember from the Mii Channel.

She and Suzy are meant to have opposite shape language. Lisa would be tall and elegant, Suzy more chubby and blocky. Lisa would be made of smooth, even blocks and circles, while Suzy would be chaotic waves and sharp angles.

On this page, I briefly experimented with animal comparisons.

My key innovation for Collin was to make his eyes enormous. He’s the worrier, after all. I wanted to give him mighty eyebrows for the same reason, but they were hard to fit on the same face.

Shape-wise, I wanted to make him even more tidy and rounded than he already was. I made his bangs a soft fringe without sharp anime points, and I gave him a round little cheek like a chibi character.

He would stand even shorter than Suzy, and have a very square frame, as if he can tuck down into a cardboard box. I think of him as a square with beveled corners.

Appropriately, Collin’s page space got taken up by refining the girls. Seems this is where I bestowed Suzy with the honor of braces. I like how I pushed Lisa’s shape further, although her head may be straying into Megamind territory.

Can you match these sketches to scenes in the story? Yes. I’m certain you can.

This is where I practiced the characters and tried out compositions. When I drew these, I wasn’t actually looking back at the designs I had just created. I just followed my vibes.

These are my thumbnail sketches for the comic. You can look at the image at a larger size... but that would kind of defeat the point.

Forcing yourself not to draw any detail in the thumbnails is an art. That’s why they have to be tiny.

I originally wrote this scene in prose, and I had to cut it down a bit for the comic. Originally Ms. Baxter was watching them in detention. In that version, the text would carry the emotion and the ending illustration could be more of a punch line. It still would have been Suzy proclamating on the desk, but Ms. Baxter would be in the foreground with an i've got one foot in the darkness and the other one in a hello kitty roller skate expression.