Creating Characters

Mustard

General Info: Mustard is a short-tempered, “cool”, laid-back dude who just wants to have a good time.

Inspiration: At the time, my boyfriend owned a bright yellow Mustang. Due to its color, I nicknamed it the “Mustard Mustang”. It stuck and after a while it got shortened to just “Mustard”. I have a decent amount of downtime at my job as a cashier where I often draw when I’m not ringing out customers, and the idea just hit me one day to turn the car into a silly little character we could draw and make jokes out of.

Character Design: Mustard still rocks his original design today. The hair was heavily based on my boyfriend’s hairstyle, just more cartoon-y and with the addition of an ahoge, or as we like to call it, the “boink”. (His hair is actually brown, but my lack of brown coloring materials on hand causes me to color it grey.) He has bright yellow eyes behind vibrant yellow sunglasses, a “cool” accessory he’s rarely seen without. I referenced a lot of sports and racing jackets to come up with the design. Black stripes on the sleeves represent the custom black stripes that were on the hood of the car when it was bought. A gold triangle necklace to not only add to style, but as a reference to Daft Punk; a few Daft Punk CDs can be found in the car. Additionally, Mustard wears a white-collared grey t-shirt, skinny black jeans, and a pair of yellow high-top converse with black laces, just because he’s that “cool” to do so. The simple base clothing references the simplicity of the car; no high-tech GPS screens that are found in most modern cars, no Bluetooth (hence the CDs), and an overall simplistic design with a few customary add-ons.

Guy

General Info: Guy is a nonchalant, approachable person who just has that natural cool factor. He’ll hit up a party any time he’s invited, though he usually doesn’t throw any of his own.

Inspiration: After an unfortunate turn of events with Mustard (the actual car) essentially breaking down, a new car was needed. So, a new yellow Mustang would replace Mustard. Of course, since Mustard was turned into a character, I just had to do the same for the new car. The name “Guy” came about pretty quickly after a short brainstorming session, named after the boyfriend and I’s appreciation for Daft Punk; Guy is named after the gold member, Guy-Manuel, and with a yellow car we thought it was a perfect fit.

Character Design: Guy has a shorter hairstyle than Mustard, but it is more tame and less wavy. A natural yellow streak was something I personally wanted to add; I didn’t want to make either characters’ hair completely yellow, but for him especially I thought a single streak was a nice touch. (Similar to Mustard, his hair is actually brown, but no brown coloring materials at the time caused me to color it grey). His eyes are a slightly darker shade of yellow, and he has no sunglasses to wear over them. A tiny goatee represents the new car’s singular black rectangle of paint as an accent on the hood. As a more laid-back person, he prioritizes comfort over style, so he wears a plain yellow hoodie over a solid black t-shirt. Along with an identical gold triangle necklace, he wears one with a pineapple on it; a reference to an inside joke of his full name being “Guynapple”. Guy also wears a pair of regular black jeans, and has “fancier” yellow shoes than converse, but are still nice for everyday wear. He has a bit more class and maturity to Mustard, and I thought that was a subtle way to show it.

Deppi

General Info: Deppi is a shy, play-it-safe, kind-hearted individual who, after a hard introduction to life, has nothing more than a positive outlook on life despite being the literal, physical embodiment of Depression.

Inspiration: When I was a teenager, I was extremely invested in this YouTube series by the name of Sanders Sides. To sum it up, it featured multiple characters that each represented a different facet of the main character’s personality. I really liked the concept, so I wanted to make my own character based on a facet that wasn’t featured in the series.

Character Design: I knew I wanted to make more of a negative emotionally-based character, since the pre-existing emotional character mainly portrayed happy ones. Since each character from that series pretty much had a color associated with them, I started there. Turquoise wasn’t one of them, so that’s the color I went with, and I thought it fit in well with representing the concept of depression without directly using the color blue. I wanted to give the character some self-conscious aspects that would lead to him feeling more depressed about himself; some original characters I’ve seen usually feature an unusual hair streak or a sort of facial scar, so why not give him both, and have the scar in a very vulnerable place? Usually people in a depressive state tend to have very minimalistic clothing; nothing too fancy or meant for “going out”. I had a dark blue and turquoise tie-dye hoodie at the time, and I loved that idea on him. He wears that hoodie over a solid turquoise long-sleeve shirt, accompanied by cozy dark grey pajama pants. His purple hair is a nod to the original series, where the main character had dyed his hair purple, and therefore all of his personality aspect characters had purple hair as well.

Captain Splash

(Created by Alex Young)

General Info: Captain Splash is the main character of his show. He's the world worst super hero yet somehow always end up completing his mission. He's awful at his job and dreams to become the worlds best hero.

Inspiration: I came up with his design in 7th grade when I looked at a 3 leaf clover and thought it would be funny to have a character with a hat in a similar shape. Slowly over time turning him into the design we have here today, I was thinking about what would be the worst super power ever, and came to the conclusion that a hose squirting water was terrible but had enough ways to make it still interesting.

Character Design: Captain splash has a squishy water-filled hat on his head with a hose connected that can spray water with a decent amount of force. He also wears a water shooting jet pack that allows him to fly around as long as it doesn't run out of water. The rest of his outfit is made up of an old exercise jump suit and red gloves and boots. His nose and limbs also resemble long sloppy hoses, and is animated in a rubber hose style to match his hose ability. He is lanky and fumbles and trips a lot causing trouble. His inspiration was old Mickey Mouse rubber hose cartoons, but also with a mix of the 90's cartoon styles like Ren and Stimpy, and Rocko's Modern Life.

Wicked Whiskers

(Created by Alex Young)

General Info: Wicked Whiskers is an old 1950's gangster mafia leader, but is never taken seriously because of his small size and clean baby face, making him not very intimidating. One day he tried out an experimental beard growth cream and it caused him to gain a mutant beard ability, being able to grow tripple his size. He has super strength just with the power of his beard, which seams to have a mind of its own.

Inspiration: Wicked Whiskers was created because I was trying to think of a super villian who's weakness would be specifically water. I thought of obvious things like paper and cardboard but that would never be strong to begin with. I thought of super mutant hair and I figured that hair gets soggy when wet, even if it is super strong hair being a mutant part of the human body.

Character Design: Wicked whiskers is a small, 3 ft tall man with a green 1950's gangster outfit on, wearing a blazer and fedora. He has a small whiskery mustache that is barely grown in and a smooth baby face. He talks like a classic New Yorker. Once he grows out his beard, it can take the form of a large monster with large hands and feet increasing his size by 3 times. The hair is so thick that it is impervious to most weaponry, and he was inspired by the red monster Gossamer from Looney Tunes.

Big Wig

(Created by Alex Young)

General Info: Big Wig is a very short but very very rich giraffe who is the lead CEO of a huge monopoly company that makes very advanced technology. He is incredibly smart but has a napoleon complex because of his size.

Inspiration: Big Wig came to be because I was thinking about making a villian who is very small and crazy, but very rich and was originally going to be a human. I wanted to make it more unique and figured that making him a small animal thats normally tall like a giraffe made it more humorous, almost like he's compesnating for his small height.

Character Design: He is a small giraffe in a rich smoking jacket. He is very smart but also very insane with a crazy expression on his face and freaks out at any insult and is very sensitive. He changes outfits into a super villain outfit when controlling his large evil robots to fight the main hero. He also has a wig on the top of his head and it flies around when he gets angry also playing into his insecurity.