Voodoo People was a fun project. The brief was to create a series of characters who are all voodoo dolls which come to life. The characters were for a VR game, of which I have seen a demo but I’m not sure if it went past that point. I used to work in the games industry back in 2000-2007 and I know how hard it is to get games past the demo stage. Often great ideas just get abandoned as there’s a lack of confidence in financing something that’s not a tried and tested formula.
The characters I’m showing here are all rendered as vectors, using Adobe Illustrator. I did a few that could be used as finished works on the game website such as this little guy. He is the main voodoo doll – Maurice. From the game description “An electrical storm developed one warm Summer’s night over Rag City dump. Lightning struck a discarded doll buried in a mountain of trash, bringing him to life. His name is Maurice, and he’s heading to the city to seek revenge on his former owner.”
This was a great project to be involved with. We took a bunch of stereotypes and created the voodoo dolls based on them. From a high-flying businessman to a short order cook. They all started life as sketches, and once approved, I was tasked with creating vector T-poses and turnarounds of them for the 3D artist to model.
Below is a selection of the vector poses. Apologies for the watermarks but digital theft is not unusual, sadly. Click/tap any image to enlarge.
I also created prop sheets for the characters, a few of which are shown below. Some of these, such as the chicken bucket wrap, could also be used as ingame textures. Click/tap to enlarge.
I hope you enjoy seeing these characters, I’m very fond of them. They are also available as NFTs from Voodoo People on Oceansea. I’ll be adding the sketch sheets to the sketchbook page, so keep an eye out for that. Not literally though, or you may need to add a button or two!
