Introducing the Characters - Blepharon aka "The Bleeph"

The previous post gave a short intro to the project itself. Right now I want to start introducing some of the hosts of the show. This first one is called Blepharon. He’s a former galactically famous daredevil known as The Bleeph. Now he is older and too many years of surfing the Milky Way without a helmet has caught up with him. Picture him as the burned-out hippie, surfer type. Rather absentminded, but sweet. He’s never reluctant to volunteer for reckless assignments and is the butt of many slapstick jokes because of it. I’m working on some phrases from his heyday that he still uses like “We went completely Super Nova!” or “I’m feeling totally Zero G right now.” Any suggestions?

Here are a few of the preliminary sketches. They come straight out of my sketchbook and are pretty rough. They’re mainly to show the thought/discovery process for this character.

The word blepharon is an English word no longer used that means someone with large eyebrows. So I designed him with bushy eyebrows as his most predominant feature. I quickly started liking aspects of this version. The large lower lip worked well against the large eyebrows. The dreds are a bit like squid tentacles. One thing I had to keep in mind though, was that this was going to be a hand puppet as well as an animated character. If I got too much on the puppet then it would be very difficult to use for long periods of time. Here he is getting a little older. Don't think I liked it though. For some reason I like the bottom one of these, but I can't see it working. I'm liking this a little more but still afraid of the weight of all those tentacle dreds on the top of the head. It's come down to this one. I'm working on a functioning version of this one. I'll post some pictures of the puppet construction later. Then I'll be able to do a final drawing of the animated version.