Concept art was apparently too good to just put up on the family fridge.
It’s safe to say that when young children draw pictures, their parents see the finished product through very different eyes than the rest of the world. Sure, the rest of the world might look at the paper and see nothing but ill-defined shapes or scribbly shading, but to a doting mother or father, sparks of creative genius are sure to appear.
That’s definitely the case with animator and artist Thomas Romain. A French national by birth, Romain currently resides in Tokyo, and has contributed in various capacities to anime series including Aria, Basquash!, Symphogear, and Space Dandy. An artistic streak seems to run in the family, as Romain’s sons also enjoy drawing pictures of characters they’ve thought up on their own. Romain then takes their designs and polishes them up as awesome, professional-grade artwork, sharing the results in a series of tweets he calls the Father and Sons Design Workshop.
The project kicked off on Christmas Day, when Romain’s older son submitted his concept sketch of a monocular alien, which Dad then fleshed out into its muscular finished form.
Next up was a design by Romain’s second son of a cyborg who’d have been right at home in the ambitious space opera anime of the early 1980s.
Switching genres, Romain then shared a multi-armed magic knight, with each hand wielding a blade of grimoire, as originally envisioned by his oldest son.
▼ The face-in-the-torso anatomy is evocative of hair-pullingly-difficult classic video game Ghosts and Goblins.
Romain promised that the fourth installment would be scarier. We’re not sure whether the resulting steampunk doctor really qualifies as frightening (unless you’ve got a massive fear of oversized needles), but it’s pretty cool nonetheless.
Romain sings off on the most recent entry in the series by telling us all to “Have a nice, creative day!” Here’s hoping that he and his offspring will too, and that they’ll be back with more of their family’s team-effort artwork soon.
Source: Jin, Twitter/@Thomasintokyo
Follow Casey on Twitter, where he’s feeling a little guilty for never designing an awesome robot for his dad.