Friday, August 5, 2011

Episode 4.003: TMNT Shinobi Mode

Yay. Found time to blog! Straight after the heels of doin the Guardian mode stuff, I went on to draw the Guardian outfits in stealth mode. When sneaking around in Virtual reality, the turtles would transform the Guardian mode outfits into these duds. It was never discussed if there were any new abilities related to this mode but I knew if I could design the look early, it would eventually written in an episode. I did not hesitate to redesign new weapons for this mode. Just an excuse to introduce new gimmicks on my part!





Leo's sketch had the only visual reference to the free floating "nodes" of Guardian mode. It's the glowing thing on his cross band. All the turtles were to wear a node on their stealth outfit at some point but only Leo's got the "experimental" alternate color.






Don was actually my first sketch for stealth mode. I remember cause he is the only one with a relaxed left hand pose! I gave Don a "Techie" mouth guard design.






I remember a gimmick I designed involving Raph's Sai and a grapling device on his arm guards. I no longer have the design but I think it was reused in a later episode of Back to the sewers. If you look at the sai an extra blade is prominently shown with the same color as the main blade






I got lazy with Mikey's Chucks. I defaulted to an earlier design I used in the TMNT Fast Forward season. I figured I'd think of something cooler later. I did redesign a totally new "holster" for Mikey's chucks.



I tagged each design with the "Shinobi" designation just to have a new mode for Guardian mode. To my knowledge these designs were never really utilised for use by the turtles. Production drew inspiration from Leo's Shinobi Design when they did a Foot clan stealth design for Back to the sewers.



Again, the colors on these came out real cool!