Suria Character Design Competition

We actually participated in the Suria Character Design Competition for the Malaysian Merdeka Day (Independence Day).

They had a few themes such as the following.

Of course being drawn to scary stuffs I was drawn to the 'Hantu Malaysia' theme which was about Malaysian Ghosts.

I therefore did a quick research on Malaysian Ghosts and these were the ones that caught my attention more.

I did a quick sketch of how they might look like based on some references available online. These ones were done on a sketchpad simply.

Online references for Toyol, Pananggal and Pontianak

We then had a lecture about character designing.

We were brought on an interface, given random characteristic for a character and had to design something out of it.

On the left are the 10 characteristic that was randomly assigned and here's my beautifully deformed babies.

This however got me very intrigued to try it out on the Penanggal that I was designing. I was actually way much more interested with the Penanggal compared to the other monsters.

As a Slipknot fan since my adolescence I was quite touched by the death of Joey Jordison, loved all the bands he's been with, Slipknot, Muderdolls, Vimic and my personal favorite now, Sinsaenum. So in his memory I designed these 2 characters.

I did a couple of other characters just to make sure that I had enough to alternatives.

I had a small presentation and my lecturer were very interested in the way I deformed the Penanggal and they told me to develop this one further and try to add a motion to it to make it look more alive in a way.

Finally this is my final creature. I tried exaggerating it but in a realistic manner somehow. I also tried to make it look like its crawling to add the idea of movement and as suggested from the reviews I added a trail of juices from it's stomach. I was also trying to make it more irregular and that's why the right eye which is pierced by the flag is slightly more up compared to the other eye.