🟢🔔⚾✨ Philly Phantastic ✨⚾🔔🟢
Breaking my fanart drought with the BEST MASCOT IN SPORTS‼️☝🏾🗣
Heh...if something looks like a Muppet, acts like a Looney Tunes character, and is mostly made up of my favorite colors…there's a good chance that I'm going to gravitate towards whatever that thing is and develop an interest in it. 😂 This isn't even the first time I've found myself seriously thinking about this character either.
I was never a sports person, but a lot of my family comes from Pennsylvania and I've been occasionally visiting that area ever since I was a kid, so, I've been aware of his existence for many years. I don't remember actually seeing him roaming around during those visits, (I feel like I would remember that…if I ever did, I certainly wasn't old enough. 🤔) just his likeness on stuff like merch and TV programs. I know I was present during at least one or two car rides past Citizens Bank Park…and I'm sure I saw his picture on the outside of the building. (Are they ever gonna put that back??)
I'm also sure that I expressed a ~little~ curiosity about The Phanatic when I was younger, but I never truly paid attention to him until 2010 or so. It was the earlier years of YouTube and I somehow came across a bunch of videos of him that other users had uploaded. As I kept watching them, I eventually learned about other sports mascots and started watching them too. x)
This year, during the latter half of July, I watched my first Phanatic-related video in who knows how long and started to wonder what he's been up to these days. It was just taking a glance at his Instagram page and going back to whatever I was doing at the time. But it wasn't too long before I was thinking about him and other mascots. Before I knew it, my interest in them was back. 😆 And strong enough to want to start drawing.
While The Phanatic does have a 2D version that makes him easier to draw, I wanted to reintegrate certain details, that were lost, into my own interpretation. And on top of that, I wanted to use this as a chance to make his face more expressive.
I absolutely LOVE the fact that he and Miss Piggy share the same builder and wanted to dig into that connection by giving him broken lines like Muppets tend to have when they're in 2D. I partially kept that connection in mind when it came to rendering the Phanatic's mouth too. When forward-facing, his 2D form already has a bit of a “:]” or “:3” type of expression. And there are pictures of him where the boa around that area gets a little worn, leaving him with a ":D" type of face. I thought it would be fun to play with that. 😄
Something else about The Phanatic's 2D form is that he always has his tongue out as opposed to some of the time, like his costume counterpart. This was probably done to highlight this funny feature about him (or maybe it was thought that mouth would look too strange without it). I like that about him too, but I still wanted to see if I could meet my goal of expressiveness, while also making him truer to costume, in a fair, satisfying way.
I don't think I've ever realized that The Phanatic has five digits on each hand. (I didn't realize the black sequins on his pupils before either! That’s a neat highlighting trick. Gives his eyes more life.) The performer only uses four of them, though. (Does it have a finger slit at all? Is it just there to make the hands look wider? To make it more cohesive with his arms? Hm, anyway…) And the modern 2D depictions never give him five. I didn't know what to do with this detail, so, alluded to it as a patch of fur-like feathers near the hand. (Wait, wing? He's supposed to be some kinda made-up flightless bird.)
I wanted to turn the mesh spot on his neck into a marking and lean harder into a pentagon shape; something very fitting for baseball. I also wanted to include the varying shades of green going on with this area, his palms and snout (beak?).
Way before I settled on how I wanted to draw The Phanatic, I was already set on doing some of his alternate outfits: I chose City Connect, Powder Blue and the 70's style pinstriped one he used to wear.
I played around with changing his stir-ups and shoes to better match the jerseys, too. (They probably didn't bother to do this to lower costs. By the way, I did try the Cream Alt, but I didn't like how it turned out. 😅 Eh, maybe next time.)
I'm pretty content with this piece, but at the same time, there's a part of me that's tempted to keep picking at things…like, I feel like I could have made the pose a bit more interesting with him leaning back…Emmmmmm, yeah, I'm gonna suppress the urge. I'm tired, lol. 😂 I jumped too soon with the first versions of these images and made all this work for myself…I flattened the colored drawing and background layers, THEN decided to fix the lineart and realized it looked better. 😐🤦🏾♀️ What I have here, is fine for an introduction. I have a solid start; I can make changes later and get better with time as I continue to draw 'im.
Before I end this post, I gotta say: I've been getting a LOT of sports notifications & such thanks to my searches on The Phanatic. So, naturally, I’ve been keeping up with The Phillies for the past few-ish months and learning more about them than I did the first time around. Even though I still have a surface level of understanding baseball and while I might not ever become a MAJOR sports fan...I DEFINITELY know how it feels to love and support something, wanting to see it succeed and having high expectations--because it was doing so well!
...Only to be left crushed when the big finale you were waiting for, takes a completely different turn...😕
Man, October 9th was a brutal day to be a Philly sports fan in general; the Eagles and Flyers lost too! 😵💫 Crazy! Ah well...I hope the Phillies win the World Series next year! And I hope you all will enjoy the mascot-related ideas I intend to get to. 👀 I have a lot of 'em, ha. Let's see how that turns out. 😅
~*K-Tee ✍🏾👩🏾🐹
Original background sources:
Baseball Field Landscape Lawn - Free photo on Pixabay
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