This little guy makes me think of a bitter, washed up stand-up comedian who’s full of sarcasm and smokes too many cigarettes. Which sounds like a fun character, but since we were designing him for a kids’ show that might be a little too cynical. The character we ended up with is a bit more charming and sweet than what you see here. But since this was one of my favorite designs that we came up with, I wanted to share him here.

We created the artwork above recently to pitch our idea for character design on a short spot. The script and the character we’re working with have changed entirely, but working on this snake was a fun challenge.

With such a basic character – essentially a tail with a face – you don’t have as much to work with as you might usually. So how to squeeze something out of just a few simple elements? For us, a big part of the solution to the problem was trying to understand the personality of the snake. We envisioned him as an affable loser who usually gets the short end of the stick, but sees himself as a suave debonaire type.

Below are some of the sketches that got us to the final above. As you can see and as anybody might expect, some of the first attempts fell short. In the end though, I thought Tim did a pretty fantastic job. I would have loved to have seen the character in animation, but just going through the design process was a great learning experience itself and a reminder to let character lead the way.

Besides “Brewer’s Bell Museum”, which Mike mentioned last week, we’ve been working on character designs for a series of new pieces that use the recorded stories of real people again. Below are a few early character designs for that project.