MooBeard: The Cow Pirate

Well, since the public demands it (I.E. Ben keeps asking) I’m going to start talking about developing the characters’ designs.

I’ll start predictably with Captain MooBeard. The fun thing about designing MooBeard is that he’s inspired by a very broad range of influences. When I came up with his eyes, I had Del tha Funkee Homosapien from Gorillaz in mind. It’s also reminiscent of an early Barney Rubble design and, as Larry Huber pointed out to me this morning Little Orphan Annie. His eyebrows were inspired by Jay from the Clerks cartoon… who always reminded me of the vegetables in Super Mario Bros 2… but I digress. MooBeard’s teeth were inspired by Max from Sam & Max: Freelance Police, but MooBeard’s are more rounded off.

When I first settled on a design for MooBeard, he had way too many details As you can see there, he’s not nearly as streamlined as he is now. It’s important for an animated cartoon character to not have an overabundance of details (especially in a TV production) because it clutters up the character making them hard to look at, and also it makes it tougher to animate when you have all sorts of unnecessary details to draw over and over.

Really, MooBeard is made of some very basic shapes: a little circle skull that leads directly into a pear shaped body with no neck at all. It’d be very easy for a stumpy character with no real legs to have cluttered hard-to-read poses, so I always have to follow a very strong line of action. You’ll notice that I try to make the stump of his leg flow right into the peg as if it were just a normal leg. Really, having peg legs doesn’t slow MooBeard down at all… in fact, it might speed him up!

Also, the more I drew MooBeard’s nose, the more I found it getting in my way. To get it out of the way and improve his silhouetting, I started gradually drawing his nose bigger and bigger and more bulbous at the end. Those of you who follow Bone will notice that something similar happened to Smiley Bone’s nose, which went from this to this.