So last night I dreamt I designed these two for a video game and I just had to paint them for my portfolio. There was a third but I woke up not being able to remember what he looked like, so I just did these two. They were actually named "Tricksy" and "Treatsy" in the dream and were supposed to be recurring characters. They're from a race of malicious trickster demons called "Kitsu", a play on "Kitsune", hence the multiple tails. From what I remember of the third member, he also had multiple tails. I can't remember how many they had in the dream but I know it was more than two. I settled on four as I remember them being inspired by Japanese myth. In the dream, I mean. And four is considered a very unlucky number in Japanese culture.

Treatsy is more hyperactive, more impulsive. He reminded me a bit of a very sadistic hyena because he giggled a lot. He wears a very worn Haida-looking mask that I'm fairly certain can't separate from his body. His "element" seemed to be shadow and darkness. He can create illusions using a combination of his tails and the foxfires that follow him around. I remember there was one part where he melted into the floor of a room, starting with his tails. His blackness covered the walls, the cieling and the floor, including the door and windows. He would attack using the foxfires and the flashes would reveal the location of his mask which was his weakpoint. He can also form them into different objects. I'm fairly certain his design was inspired by another artist I watch as I was looking at her art shortly before I went to bed.

Tricksy is the more dangerous and the "ring leader". He comes off as sort of quiet and passive but is much more calculating and I got the feeling he is older than the other two in the dream. I kept having to change his face in the dream until my supervisor finally told me to "keep that aspect". So in several scenes in the dream game, his face was different and ranged from a more normal Japanese macaqe with large, human eyes to something like you see here, where the eyes looked similar to a chamleon's. From afar he looks almost like a normal monkey but his body sports patchy fur. The tabard he wears is supposedly made from human skin. He drew the face on it himself, probably with blood, and it's supposed to look like him in some bizarre way. I think he was very narcissitic. Perhaps the most curious feature of Tricksy is that he can draw his arms inside his body. They can push out extremely fast, reaching all the way across a room, growing to enormous size if need be. His hands reminded me of some primordial creature's; webbed with thin fingers and skin that becomes more transparent the more it's stretched. In the game, they were his weakpoint.

I might do some concept doodles to accompany these. I put more effort into them because I just felt like I needed to. Hopefully I can remember some more about the third member of their party...