Kraken Punch

There was once a human martial artist named Fang Lee, who traveled the land protecting the weak from vile tyrants and corrupt rulers.

There was once a kraken scholar named Sven, who worked as a biology professor at the University of Atlantis.

But then an arcane ritual gone horribly wrong fuses them into a single hybrid body. Now with two minds living inside a shared body, they travel the land in search of a way to undo this involuntary transformation and restore their original bodies.

But in the shadows lurks the vengeful ex-overlord Dr. Hydrophobe, who is well aware of their predicament. He sees this as a golden opportunity to punish Fang Lee for dethroning him from his empire of evil, while simultaneously making Professor Sven pay for that failing grade he received in Comparative Magical Engineering 101.

Will our hero(es) succeed in restoring their former selves? Or will Dr. Hydrophobe succeed in killing two birds with one stone?

~*~*~*~*~*~

This is my “Just-for-Fun” entry for the Seventh Sanctum Fantasy Fusion Contest [link=[link]. It took me a while to decide which generator result to use, mainly because I was having a difficult time coming up with ways to portray all the aspects of the character. I ended up going with the following generator result:

“The educated, heroic male half-Kraken martial artist. His face hints at his non-human ancestry, but he otherwise appears human.”

My original idea was to draw a martial artist with one of those long, thin, cliché mustaches, but made out of tentacles instead of hair. I didn’t want to go with a full beard, otherwise I’d just be copying Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean (and besides, martial artists are typically beardless). I wanted to go with something different, so tentacle mustache was it!

Drawing the half-kraken head proved to be a little difficult. Not because of the mustache, but rather the facial expression (eyes and mouth especially). The first rendition looked too villainous for a “heroic martial artist.” In other renditions, he looked too much like an alien or an illithid/mind flayer. I suppose the main reason for this is that villains are all-too-often the ones with bald heads, tentacles, and/or lab coats. You’re mind just automatically thinks “Villain” instead of “Hero” when you see these things. To help fix this, I dropped the original “calm and serious warrior” look and changed his expression to a cocky grin.

Speaking of the lab coat, I threw it in at the last minute. For the longest time I couldn’t think of what he should wear on his torso (I knew what his head would look like from the start, and every martial artist needs cool baggy pants). Since the Kraken aspect of the character was a Professor, I decided to go with a lab coat. I still don’t know how a Kraken is able to wear a lab coat prior to becoming a half-human hybrid, but I’m sure anything is possible for a mythological creature from Scandinavia. Besides, it’s really fun to draw long coats on martial artists.

I had fun with this art style. I wanted to try drawing in a style that was vastly different than my previous work, so I decided to go with using primarily one color and a contrasting spot-color. As I was working on it, I found that it began to resemble a comic-book drawing style (which it weird because I’m not a fan of the superhero genre). While accidental, I think it fits since the character is a heroic martial artist (or at least half of one).

I drew the line art in Flash, while the colors and textures were made with Adobe Photoshop CS.