Game Development - Rareware Inspired Project: Treacle the Skunk

I've started work on a 2D Rareware inspired game, and as a test piece, I've 3D modelled one of the characters I've designed for it called Treacle the Skunk.

I'm not sure what her role in the game will be yet, but at the moment, she's the main characters girlfriend and is either the damsel in distress or owns an item shop.

The original concept.

The model I created, I took some liberties with the concept and changed her design whilst modelling.
This model is MK1, since the leg mesh I created for this model worked horribly when rigged.
I made new legs in MK2.

I threw together a quick shop scene to see if she'd fit in a store setting.
The leg mesh looks even worse here.

The newest version of the model with legs that don't suck.

To give her a 'Donkey Kong Country' style look to her sprites, I reduced the sprite to a very small resolution and used the Posterize tool in Photoshop.
To the left is Candy Kong from Donkey Kong Country (1994) to show how similar the sprites look now the filter is applied.

A test animation; its jerky and doesn't loop well but it's my first attempt, and I think it looks really similar to Donkey Kong County.

Higher resolution.

I'm going to develop more 3D characters and use the same process as Treacle to create a bunch of sprites for my project.

Fanart - Clockwerk - "Perfection has no age."

I digitally painted some fanart of Clockwerk, the robotic owl villain from the Sly Cooper video game series.
I mainly did it to develop my digital painting skills and I wanted to try to convey a sense of speed and movement, as if Clockwerk is gliding straight into the viewer with his talons poised.
One problem I had to overcome was that whoever designed Clockwerk in the Sly Cooper games has ADHD or something.
Clockwerk's design changes every five seconds, he looks different in each game, cutscene and promotional artwork, they couldn't settle on a single design, so for this, I Incorporated the best parts of each design to create a single design that appeals to every design.

I named the piece "Perfection has no age." after one of Clockwerk's quotes from Sly Raccoon/Sly Cooper and Thievius Raccoonus.

I started with a very rough sketch as a guideline to where I would paint.

Block in the colours. This ended up being around 30+ layers.

Start shading in the pieces using a soft brush at 30% Opacity, and a vivd light layer for the glowing eyes.

The head is shaded, and already it looks pretty damn intimidating.

The body was shaded next.
Super Special Fun Fact: I lost the progress on this the first time doing this since my POS laptop died and I lost the file.
I had backed it up at an earlier point so I could do it again, but it was more work than it needed to be.

Anyway, onto the final piece.

Adding focus blurred talons and a radial blur to his wings finishes the image, and here you have Clockwerk.
I'm really pleased with the outcome of this image, and although I lost progress and had to start a lot again, it was worth it in the end.

While I'm here, here's the Sly 2: Band of Thieves variant I did which features Clock-La instead of Clockwerk.

The variation I did with Clock-La.
Yay for cheap colour tinting and adding a somewhat creepy face to Clockwerk's beak.