I managed to do the 4-piece image below in one day. For anyone not knowing about this creature, it's one that I've made up of my balloon clown creature but as an evil ghostly clown version.
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| One-Day Character Design - Inked Sketch (Top Left), Cleaned up Computer Image (Top Right), Fully Inked and Watercolours (Bottom Left) and Photoshop Colouring Image (Bottom Right). |
So I officially called it a 'Shadow Clown'. They are airborne flyers like Balloon Clowns but with a more carnival goth fashion and notoriously terrifying. Due to the use of an unknown plant resource for making a stronger rubber membrane, these alternative kind of Balloon Clowns became tougher and almost un-popable. However it caused them to become less colourful, behaving creepier and mischievous and slowly gaining magical dark shadow powers over time. Becoming more drawn to these dark powers, they use them with their decorative yet frightening appearances to scare and/or place satirical curses on their victims. They have also shapeshifting abilities to change into terrifying monster forms or into deceitful forms like an elder man/woman to mislead their victims into traps. The Balloon Clowns soon feared these "warped clowns" and forced them to leave from their homeland of Ballogna.
Their dark magic and their bodies are fuelled by fear and anxiety, the greater the terror they wreak upon people, the more negative essences they can harvest to strengthen themselves. Some victims can ended up within some very warped chaos or be transformed into twisted new forms, depending on the clown's dark sense of humour and strength of dark magic, to be greatly mortified out of their fear. It's even possible for victims to be converted into Shadow Clowns too for scares, though it is rare since the Shadow Clowns usually don't like to create rivals or share their "haunting" grounds with too many of their own kind. They tend to wear obsidian amulets and other dark stone accessories to contain their victims' harvested fears, though they can just absorb or eats the fear essences mostly.
Their only surefire weakness is sunlight as the strong light on skin contact burns and boils on them. Bright flashes of lights can be used against them to briefly blind them while victims flee or spotlight beams can pin them down to paralyze or disempower them. They could then be burned with fire or even popped like Balloon Clowns. Bottling them into magic-sealing containers is another alternative to capturing them, even to be use for others' services like genie slaves by savvy owners. Due to their solar weakness, Shadow Clowns avoid being out during the daytime so to avoid being burned away to black ashes. The exception is when there's thick cloudy skies, thick smoke or fog to block out much of the sunlight.
Anyone's hometown that is plagued with Shadow Clowns avoid being outside in the nighttime to keep from being cursed. As well leave on bright lights throughout their homes to minimize shadows that those creatures can travel through or hide within. However the curses, no matter how terrible, are not permanent; after some time in the daylight, what or who was cursed is cleanse of the dark magic and revert back to their natural states. For Shadow Clown-converted victims, they can remain as Shadow Clowns if they so choose by avoiding the sunlight thereafter. The dark essences and magic eventually in time permanently settles into them as they haunt and curse others for power and longevity.
I got inspiration for the look from a classical christmas special called 'Nilus the Sandman: The Boy Who Dreamed Christmas' with a character called the Toymaster (plus some other evil clown images).
An earlier sketch and rendering of some generic Shadow Clowns.
