Putting a face to a voice

I was quite stuck for ideas when it came to designing the characters for flash, because I couldn't really get a clear understanding of what kind of personality they had from the small highlighted sections, so I sort of took one teeny thing I picked up from them and exaggerated it.

I ended up designing them all as tree-dwelling animals mainly because hearing one of them explain something put me in the mind of an owl, being all exposition-y. Althogh I found later that it seems to be only one voice clip from the trio rather than all the highlighted ones, so on the section I selected you get two people talking rather than the three. I'm still including all of the characters though, seeing as you can hear background laughter.

Rather than posting each image individually, writing about it then repeating ad infinitum, I've made a big collection of the images with the explanations next to them, the colour stuff will be posted seperately.

This is the painted background, made to be fairly simple with the colour scheme so the characters don't look too out of place next to masses of detail.

And here are the final character designs with colours. I decided on a Barn Owl for Matt, because the colouring was so striking, and a grey squirrel to stop all the characters being brown.