Nature Bean Character Designs

Hey ho. A few months ago I did a few little character designs for a pitch we were going for at work. Unfortunately my little characters didn't cut it for the job, but I still quite liked them, so I thought I would post the development stages up on here for your eyes to peel (that phrase makes me feel a bit weird).

So at a brainstorm meeting I was told to try and make some pretty simple, abstract characters to represent several different sections of a document. One character was to be a junior explorer, the next a farmer, a walker, and lastly a scientist.
I found starting these character designs pretty difficult, and after quite a long time I ended up with these:

I was pretty unhappy with these designs, but I felt like I had hit a wall and couldn't think past it; so I decided to go on a completely different route:

These characters were very much influenced by the illustration work of Sanjay Patel, specifically the characters he made for 'The Little Book of Hindu Deities'. (I love this book). So this approach was a big step away from the original brief I was given, and I knew we couldn't use it; but the process of trying a different style seem to refresh my brain and I was then able to think up of these characters:

I had the idea of the characters being like cute little beans very much influenced by this adorable set of characters harking from Japan: Mameshiba

I love mameshiba, definitely watch the videos on their website!
So I had the base, I just had to do a bit of tinkering:

I played with textures to give the characters a little more depth, but I still liked the original ones I had done. I thought I would have one more experiment with the shape and size of these characters to express a bit more diversity amongst them and this is was the result:

Overall I'm pretty pleased with the final character designs - I tried to convery a vague vegetable/food shape to each character e.g. The junior adventurer is a bean/seed, the farmer is a potato, the walker is a green bean and the scientist is a pea!
This turned out to be quite a fun brief to work on - after the initial hardships of not feeling up to the challenge! I think I learnt a lesson in that when you are really stuck for ideas sometimes its best to just try something completely different to invigorate your imagination - sort of like going for a jog in your brain I suppose!