A while back Mike Devito approached me with a project he thought I might be interested in, something dreamed up by Mike Raicht and Brian Smith, and it turned out to be a project filled with things I’ve wanted to draw for a very long time… I just didn’t know it yet. It also had a pretty hefty title to live up to. How does one come up with the look of the “stuff of legend?” The premise was intriguing, especially to an illustrator such as myself, and my imagination took off as soon as I dived into the story outline and character descriptions.
Here are the first concept illustrations with descriptions:
The story is about a group of toys who enter another realm through their owner’s closet, and once they enter they transform into more realistic versions of themselves. The duck pull-toy becomes a real duck, the teddy-bear becomes a real bear, etc. One of the first things that hit me was the reader was going to have to be able to connect the two, to really know that the duck was the same duck pull-toy, that the bear was the same teddy-bear, and while I knew color would definitely link them together, I thought I’d try to take a step further and implement patterns into their character designs (like stripes!). I also had to figure out how some things might translate from the toy version to the real version, such as the spring in the jack-in-the-box (Jester). For the jester’s spring, I gave him stripes on his legs.
The Boogeyman was a bit tough. He’s always been the spook in the closet, under the bed, any area of a darkened room not illuminated by the night-light, so I thought his look should be something made of the dark. A lot of black. I thought I’d give him a bit of texture to his appearance, and after a while I came up with the black, tar-like fire that drips upwards and away from him. Since we see him in a world of his own creation, I added bits of the goopy fire coming out of the ground around him to help emphasize his connection to the place, as if it’s visibly made of him in some respect, maybe so much that he can pour himself up and out of the ground everywhere and anywhere. Since he would be mostly cloaked I figured a good area of contrast would be his hands and his face, two areas I would be trying to sell his gestures. For his skin’s texture I tried for something porcelain – something that could possible be interpreted as cold and lifeless, and as his face transformed the veinish cracks could pull into wrinkles.
Here’s more of the Boogeyman with Hammy, who is a piggy bank in the real world, and the Princess, who is a wooden figurine.
Anyway I hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction into the creative process behind a project I’ve been fortunate enough to work on!
