Noodle Girl.

Initial concepts for the main female and male characters. We decided to go with the evil Cyborg Chef and the Noodle Girl (bottom right). The Buddha Warrior Bao Bun Girl were shelved for further development.

This is the final design for the robot character. Because the owner naturally wishes to expand his business, I wanted to make a little joke about the future if he ever went corporate.

Evil Robo Chef.

This character started off as a variation of the Chunky Buddha Logo, but eventually evolved into its own concept.

Back story: Driven in his desire for success, he accidentally cut off his own limbs in the middle of a sushi competition. Now more machine than man, little is in his way of becoming the most powerful Sushi Chef of all time.

I was asked to design a cute little robot character.

Because robots can be both a functional machine and a character, this was actually more challenging than a human character despite the simplicity. The question was whether to approach this as a vehicle design first or a character design.

In this case we settled on Number 4 as the starting point – a character first with a machinery ‘overlay’.