Moon Travellers - building a new character series from scratch (Patreon)

Hey guys,

today I'd like to give you some insights into a very new side project of mine, to show you how I come up with new ideas and transfer these into visuals. This one will be about Moon Travellers, a little character series I'm planning to do and sell as NFTs.

Coming up with ideas from everywhere

If asked about my main sources of inspiration, I usually answer "life". It's meant as a joke, but there's some truth in it. In my opinion, you can indeed get inspiration from art projects from everywhere.

In the newspaper we get, I read about the poor former planet, now dwarf-planet Pluto and its satellite moons. I didn't know Pluto had moons (did you?). I realized that from the large number of moons in our solar system, there's only just a few I knew. So I hit Wikipedia to do some research - not with an art project in mind, but just for fun.

I started taking some notes about the moons. They're mostly named after characters from greek mythology or even Shakespeare plays, so I started wondering if these moons had some kind of personality.

Taking down notes into my sketchbook helps me organizing my brain (even though my sketchbook pages do not look organized :D). And often they lead to project ideas when I just keep on writing down thoughts and ideas. Sometimes these ideas make it into projects for real, like it happened with the Moon Travellers.

Turning a rough idea into a plan

I liked the idea of turning the characteristics of moons into real characters, and allowed myself a bit of time to explore the possiblity of making a project out of it. Here, a certain kind of routine starts, which includes:

Roughly outlining the project's direction and purpose: what could be the goal of the project? What's the meaning behind it? Answering this helps you to get a better feeling for what you're doing right now.

Researching for similar projects: If it's already existing, I don't need to repeat it. But you can always pivot a project a little instead of cancelling it.

First steps into art direction: Thinking about the overall look & feel. I usually just take down notes giving the project some attributes: "soft & warm shapes, sci-fi/fantasy vibes without too much cyberpunk, colorful" etc. This also includes building a quick moodboard.

Doability test: outlining a first round of characters based on information I can find. Is there enough material that I can turn into an artwork? More on that later!

Prototyping: As I'd like this to become a little series, I create concepts for three first artworks the collection could start off with. These are the prototypes.

Here's a moodboard with some works I took from a Pinterest board. I was looking for character shots with a ~3/4 profile view. Some lovely work there by Sachin Teng, Lord Gris and Guweiz! It's also at the same time a little color research for IO, the first character I wanted to draw!

Translating information into a visual concept

The next step is gathering information and facts that I can re-interpret for visual ideas. This is one of the main principles of my work: Take existing information - re-interpret and mix them with my ideas - create something new from it.

For IO, the first of my moon characters, there's some aspects that I found interesting enough to write down:

Io is the most volcanic place in the whole solar system. Fire, lava, smoke come to mind.

She has beautiful red-brown-yellow colors from all that sulfur.

In Greek mythology, Io, is a Priestess and a lover of Zeus.

She's one of the best known and prominent moons, first moon of Jupiter, and was discovered by Galileo Galilei.

I then took these facts and translated them into something visual in the form of a scribble. You can see how I used the information (has to be Jupiter in the note,  not Saturn btw)

I repeated the same process for RHEA, a moon of Saturn. Rhea is a cold moon, made of ice and stone. In Greek mythology, she's a strong mother, can control time and is the wife of Saturn (in the final version, I gave her a necklace with the Saturn symbol).

In the image gallery, you see the scribble for the third character, Oberon. I guess you know how it works by know - what do you think are characteristics of Oberon? ;)

Project guidelines as a base to keep on creating

From here on, I start drawing and painting the final artworks. So what is all this project building good for? In my opinion, creating these guidelines is an amazing strategy to keep yourself actively making art. Do you know these weeks where you just can't come up with good ideas? If you have an ongoing project, you can just come back to that, get to work after the outlines you set yourself - the creative juices will flow again soon!

As for Moon Travellers, our solar system has 150 moons or so...lots of potential work :D I also always have like 5 different projects that I can come back to when I want.

I hope you found this little insight into my process interesting and helpful! As always, let me know feedback or questions in the comments! Critique club members can of course also present their project to me to get feedback!