Mahabharata Character Designs

One of the projects in my character design class was to take two characters from a myth/fable and create designs for them. I didn't want to make my job easy by choosing something like Hercules or Little Red Riding Hood, stories that have been adapted visually countless times for Americans. I wanted to push myself and discover something new in the same breath. So I put a bunch of stories that I've never heard of from around the world on a wheel and spun it. It landed on the Mahabharata a great Indian epic and, according to Wikipedia at least, the longest poem ever written.

I won't lie, reading up on it gave me shivers. Making designs for something like this felt daunting but also so exciting. I decided to treat this as if I was working at Disney and asked to make designs for a Mahabharata adaptation.

The first order of business was experiencing the story, which I did by watching the Peter Brook's adaptation which has unfortunately been removed from YouTube due to a copyright claim. It was dramatic and fantastical, yet still grounded. In the story of kings and demigods, the Mahabharata highlighted the humanity of its characters and the relationships they built. Realizing this, I knew that the style couldn't be filled with muscle-ly action men, but I also didn't want it to be drawn in too childlike a style. I wanted the style to feel like a moving painting, not an educational cartoon or a superhero comic book. This was a dramatic epic after all! Kind of like the more abstract and surreal cartoons Europeans tend to make. The Secret of Kells was a big point of inspiration.

But looking to only Western art for the style would defeat the purpose of looking for stories outside my wheelhouse.

I looked to the works of Rajput paintings like this: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/76075?

And:

I also looked towards the cartoonist and filmmaker Bapu: https://bapuartcollection.com/inspirations-influences

And the Portuguese artist Filipe Andrade who worked with Indian writer Ram V. on The Many Deaths of Laila Starr:

Putting all of these inspirations in a bin, I wanted a bold style with strong shape design and symbolism embedded in the characters' design. The use of oval eyes, slender fingers, and simple colors were also aspects I took into consideration.

After understanding the story and choosing the guidelines I'd hold myself too, I got to work making designs for the brothers Pandu and Dhritarashtra.

For Pandu, I wanted to make a large man with the makings of a king whose mistake stains him for life. A square body and a large beard seemed befitting. I also stained his cloth belt and hands in blood due to events later in the story, I wanted to symbolize his cursed guilt with an obvious call to being "red-handed"

For Dhritarashtra, I wanted to make a feeble yet elegant man who has kingship thrust upon him. Long in every sense of the word. In the movie, they often talk about how Dhritarashtra ruled the night due to his blindness. Night being the only time he was in his element compared to others. To play with this, I gave him eyes like the moon and hair like the stars. I won't lie, I patted myself on the back heavily when I came up with that.

In the gallery, you'll find colored full-body drawings, turnarounds, rules, and sketches. I'm really happy with how this turned out but I wish I did it digitally.