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Doctor Ripper Roo — Description
My animation director reccommended that I work on my cartoon animals (you know, for variety's sakes) and suggested that I hit my animation textbooks and just draw, draw, draw.
This is one of my better sketches so I inked it and quickly threw in color in photoshop. I'm still trying to master the whole "has cartoon anatomy but still has structure" Preston Blair-ish style.

Ripper Roo is probably my favorite non-scientist villain in Crash Bandicoot. The PS1 Crash Bandicoot games had some incredible character designs and Ripper Roo was no exception.

Before anyone asks why his eyes are "wrong", let me explain. I hate to say it, but this was partially influenced by the Crash Bandicoot manga. (hence just the irises are swirly as opposed to his entire eyeball) Most of the liberties they took with the game characters were rather lame, but for some reason I really enjoyed their version of Ripper Roo. He's this scheming researcher who acts like he's giving Crash food and shelter out of the kindess of his heart when in reality he's waiting for Crash to let his guard down so that he can steal his power crystal. Seen here. It takes liberties with the games but in Ripper's case it arguably works. The rest of the manga is just "okay".

So I tried to work the manga version's design and attitude into the game version. I don't know why, but I like the idea that Ripper Roo is secretly Cortex's most intelligent creation, but the experiments shattered his brain into an unrepairable mess which means most of the time he's a gibbering nutball and therefore next to useless, to the point where his upper arms have to be restrained so he doesn't go and rip people to shreds. (Get it? Rip? Because he's RIPPER Roo! ...sorry.)
Still, in Crash 2, it shows that he has some moments of sanity. I can't imagine how he'd act in his lucid moments of clarity but I'd imagine it isn't good.

Before anyone says anything, YES, I know his eyebrows are dark blue in the game. I changed his eyebrows on purpose so that they'd match his mustache. Otherwise it just looked too isolated.

Upped the contrast with my cel shading. It worked a LOT better than my last cel shading attempts.

I had fun with this. I might do some more quickie cartoon experiments.