Ego Trip Abroad, 6.8

The challenge: Create an alter-ego of yourself as an anime character.


Other artists: Josh Hagen, (his work can be found here), took part in this week's challenge again. He went for a more unique looking anime character that could have been found in something Miyazaki worked on. We are hoping to collaborate on a concept together sometime soon!


My concept: So I am not a huge fan of anime, so I didn't have a lot to draw from (punny) for this challenge. However, I knew exactly what I wanted to do for my alter ego!
When I was a kid and first starting into digital art, I was super into the pixel-art scene and was a member of Microheroes International Board.
My avatar was always a character named Poseidon; a young man that was the God of Water in a past life and was slowly realizing his powers. (These pixel drawings you see were an evolution from like 5th grade to 9th grade, so don't think too critically about my MS Paint skills)

When putting this into my anime character, I wanted to bring more of myself into it, and less of the "fishy" part. I wanted to pull from typical anime fashion for the costume, but style the face to resemble me (bigger eyebrows and a longer nose). The hardest part about this challenge was translating the 2D cartoon onto a 3D character. Several people tried to retain the "cartoon" aspects, while I would have tried to make it more of a "cosplay" look with small prosthetic pieces.

I didn't like the look of the full facial sculpts that several of the artists did, so I would do a thinner nose application, round out the jaw, and do some scuplting around the eyes to give it the anime styling I want.