Hamsters wearing capes

Yep, you read that right.  Hamsters wearing capes.  It isn't often that someone comes to you at work and asks you to draw hamsters wearing capes. And yet somehow, that was the request I got a couple weeks ago... Why, you ask? Well, we've got this web series called The Setlist, and they wanted to have a flying hamster for the episode featuring Parry Gripp because apparently part of his "thing" is that he performs silly songs while wearing a hamster costume.

These hamsters went through a couple early revisions which got me to the final versions. Below are two preliminary rough sketches I did to get an idea for just what it was I was heading towards. The first was done on paper, the second was sketched out super fast using Sketchbook Mobile on my iPhone on my walk home from the gym.

Here are the final hamsters, colored and finished before being placed in the webisode.

You may notice that the upper right hamster draws its inspiration from a couple different things... First, the hamster's pose is very similar to the classic Mighty Mouse flight pose. The other source of inspiration was Iradicator from the Superman comics of the 90s, who showed up after Supes' death at the hands of Doomsday. Yep, I'm a geek. What can I say?

And here is the episode of The Setlist so you can see the hamsters in action!

Thanks to Dave and Kes for asking me to help out on this. I can't even recall the number of times while I was working that I had to stop because I couldn't stop laughing at the ridiculous fact that I was sitting around drawing hamsters with capes.