← Lyle Moore (he/him)

[anxious, lacks self confidence, trying to get his life together, ready for a new beginning, determined]

After a distant and reclusive relative dies, Lyle suddenly finds himself as the owner of a very old (and very haunted) Victorian-era home. Embracing this new-found independence, he clumsily tries his hand at cooking from scratch for the first time, unknowingly catching the attention of the home’s very concerned resident ghost…

Jimmy Bobbe (he/him) →

[energetic, joyful, eager to help, confident, frustrated by his limits, particular, curious]

In life, Jimmy was once a proud homeowner. In death, Jimmy’s ghost is now owned by his home. Rather than worrying about being trapped in this house for eternity, he’s much more interested in meeting its newest inhabitant! When Lyle proves himself to be a miserable and borderline hazardous home cook, Jimmy does his best to lend a hand.

For Lyle’s final design, I decided that the teal made him pop off of the background while also keeping him visually distinct from Jimmy.

I made several subtle changes to his design that helped to make him quicker to animate.

• The nose became a solid shape instead of linework which made it easier to render at odd angles.

• I simplified both his leg shape and hair shape (while trying to preserve his hair texture)

• I tested some simpler eyebrow shapes, but the thin lines changed his face too much for me.

• I also played around with the idea of giving him dot eyes, but I decided the extra drawing was worth having more expression in the eyes.

With Jimmy being a ghost, one of the first things I had to decide was how and when he died.

The younger that Jimmy ended up being, the younger he must have been when he died, which inherently suggested some sort of tragic and untimely demise. If he were an older man, there was more room for him to have died of natural causes after a long and full life.

In the end, I went with making Jimmy around Lyle’s age. That puts Jimmy and Lyle in a relatively similar spot, but while Jimmy’s life had abruptly ended in his mid 20’s, Lyle’s life is just beginning.

An older Jimmy also would have changed the dynamic. I prefer them as two peers who both have a little maturing to do still. It makes them feel more like equals instead of like a mentor and student.

Here (below) I was trying to decide how I wanted to visually convey that Jimmy was a ghost in comparison to Lyle. I knew from the start that I didn’t want him to be colored naturally; I wanted him to look out of place and otherworldly from the moment you saw him. The monochrome color scheme also helps to make his silhouette readable even as a transparent shape on a complex background.

I played around with whether or not I wanted him to be see-through, how many shades of blue I wanted to use, and if it was better to include the blood stain or leave it out. Do ghosts bleed? Should it be blue like the rest of him? I was also experimenting with how he might stand/move around in this state.

In his final design, Jimmy ended up being a single, transparent shade of blue. I also simplified his nose and eyebrows like I did for Lyle.

I inevitably decided that I preferred the single pop of red on his design to the 100% blue version. I really wanted Jimmy’s grim reality to be in stark contrast with his cheerful attitude. His past is literally still part of him, and while the violence of his demise is very obvious to the viewer, Jimmy is seemingly oblivious to it. In his eyes, he’s just a normal guy, and it’s clearly been a long time since he’s met anyone new or been reminded that a knife-wielding ghost is a bit scary.