Akox Shortwick

As more and more people know @steemmonsters is a thing now.

Steemit's own phantasy card game that is slowly rolling out and most certainly worth to have a peak at!

The Monster trader

Together with the heroes @calumam and @penderis we decided to join forces and create one Steemmonsters persona together ---> @themonstertrader

One for all, all for Akox

During our first brainstorm we discussed what our persona would be. We decided to go for a trader/merchant as we are planning to be trading cards and doing so in the form of a story.

Uncertain as what race our persona should be we considered: Pig, fox, Human but ended up with Goblin as... let's be honnest... who doesn't love a clever sarcastic Goblin!?
So goblin it is. Aptly named Akox Shortwick (thank technology for name generators to get the inspirational juices flowing)

To read up a bit about Akox check out the first chapter of The Traders Tale

The style

Even though we did talk about different styles (realistic, Clash of clans 3D ish, etc) as soon as Cuphead / Rubber hose / 30s cartoon was suggested (think cuphead, felix the cat, betty boop, early disney, etc)... we kinda knew we just had to go into that direction as for one it is an amazingly entertaining style and it would stand out.

Design

As one tends to do I started with a sketch, not knowing where to go exactly I decided to look at goblin references and from there on just draw a head and see where that would take us.

Many sketches later I decided to go for this one
(as quite honestly... it was the only one that looked semi decent)

Making it digital

What followed next was making it digital. Not that hard of a task but still time consuming. Especially choosing the right color scheme. But in the end this was just a matter of trial and error leading to success. Yay! Our persona had a face!

What was lacking was a body... Goblins are short and even though there are some nice short characters in the 30s cartoons, we felt that a longer sluglish body would just be more fun. So we created worlds first tall Goblin.

(Who cares about hand and feet anyhow...)

The loss of focus...

I honestly did try to stay focused and finish the design... But my mind just steamrolled from one idea to the next without halt.

As something else needed was transportation for our lovely persona....
We all decided that our persona would be driving a bike. So we went looking for bike images to use as reference.
We found these two lovely ones on pixabay:

_{by Roi Dimor}