Pepe and Lucas - The Clown who would be Clown.

Spoiler Alert: this guy is the evil Magician.

It was a difficult choice to make, but this guy was determined to be a little less of a perfect fit for our protagonist. At that point, the story had lost the Magician as a main character, but later my director introduced him at the end of the short as an easter egg - the villain who might threaten Pepe and Lucas' happiness and new found success. The body shapes and silhouette still worked very well within the style of the other two main characters, so we gave him a wardrobe and personality change. In retrospect, I think the key to this character's success is that hair. It works even better as a dome of greasy, evil guy hair.

I still went through a thorough exploration of color palettes with this clown.

Eventually, red became the unifying color for this clown's design, just like with the design we ended up using. As you can see, I kept the tie white for most of the exploration, but as I was adding more and more red to the other clown design, I did the same for this guy.

I think the one element that made this guy just a little less perfect, was that he feels more contemporary. The colors are a little modern too, especially the neon greens, but even the design of the clothes elements feels like something you might see on a clown today.

I love doing expression sheets. It helps flesh out the character personality, but with highly stylized characters, it's particularly valuable to see how your character's expressions and movements work with abstracted body forms. I didn't hear any complaints about this character when we modeled him as the Magician, but he only had a little screen time. The other final Clown design caused some concerns because the nose was much higher on the face and often blocked out a lot of the eyes when we saw him from the front, which caused us to adjust the design in 3D to make his eye movements a little more legible.