The most recent project in my Animation for the Illustrator class was based on Hanna-Barbera’s Wacky Races cartoon from 1968. The show features a (wacky) cast of characters, each of them based on a theme of some kind. For example, one of the racing crews is comprised of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, who drive a haunted mansion with a dragon in it. The project itself was to create our own wacky racers and their automobile of choice. I grew up watching this show, so I was excited for the project.
After playing with the idea of a clown car and then deciding against it (because half of my projects this semester have involved clowns and I am starting to feel like I am falling back on them whenever I need a quick idea), I decided to work with gargoyles who drive (or ride?) a gothic cathedral of sorts. Only a week before had I read the wikipedia article on gargoyles, so the idea was already floating around in my head.
I sketched a few out—along with a wizard on a skateboard—and then did some digital variations to decide on colors and proportions.
I have four gargoyles, but only one of them has a body. The bodied gargoyle is their leader who sits in the front and directs the walking cathedral spire. The spire has a bell in it, which jangles aggressively when they move at high speeds. The other three gargoyles quarrel between themselves and spit water at other cars. The lead gargoyle breathes fire instead, because I loosely based it off the french legend of the Gargouille, which I discovered in my Wikipedia spelunking. The Gargouille was a dragon who spit fire. It was defeated by St. Romanus in the 7th century, who, after burning it and finding that the head would not burn because it had been fire-proofed by its own fire, mounted the head on a new church for protection and to ward off evil spirits.
As for the cathedral, I basically referenced as many pictures as I could find, and made it as tall as I could. If it were to exist in the show, the audience would never see the top of it.
This was a very enjoyable project to work on, and I loved getting to read about gargoyles for it, since I was doing that anyway.