Buddies of the Sea, Early Incarnations
Now that my book, The Great Turtle Rescue: Buddies of the Sea, is almost ready to go to print (and because the Stickers are av-ailable for purchase already!) I figured I'd kick off this blog with some of my early concepts with the buddies.
First comes our star, Shelly the sea Turtle! She had quite a few permutations, especially because she originally was going to be a Leatherback Sea Turtle.
The first Sketch..
...And the original colored version.
This version of Shelly was described as looking like a "Scary dinosaur," so I decided the loggerhead was a better choice for her. They are very iconic looking! That doesn't necessarily mean that I didn't have issues designing her at first...
Quite possibly my favorite little doodle ever, honestly... look at this goofy turtle! She looked too simple and silly, though. Still... I think this design is cute.
This one, on the other hand, is fairly hideous. Sometimes you just gotta keep trying!
Another of the buddies that gave me a lot of trouble was Rudy the Redfish. Fish are kind of weird looking to begin with.
Rudy originally had a fisherman's outfit on, which I realize now is a bit messed up. I ended up making him a more childlike, cutesy character like Ollie the Octopus.
Speaking of ollie, he was one of the few designs that didn't change a bit... good job, Ollie!
Bubba the Gator, on the other hand...
...he started out pretty terrible looking...
...As did Clyde the Crab.
I actually had so much trouble with Bubba's design at first, I almost canned the alligator character altogether, and tried to design a caiman character, but...
He turned out looking like a pretentious hipster, which I'm ok with in principle but as far as the story went, I couldn't really figure out anything for him to do. Luckily, I was able to salvage Bubba's design.. perhaps the hipster caiman will appear in another Buddies of the sea tale? Only time will tell...