A fan redesign of Zee Jay: a black fur monkey with hair locs. He is wearing a beanie, a loose print tee ('ZJ' printed on the front), headphones around his neck, fingerless gloves, skater jeans and sneakers. A hoverboard is held at his side. Purple and yellow paint is splattered all over his fur and clothes.

throws the sydney opera house hat into the ether

I don’t like a lot about the design of the new Bloons Card Storm hero Zee Jay so here’s my attempt at a redesign.

The thought process:

  • Replaced the nonsensical helmet with a beanie. I avoided making it the hood of a hoodie cause I wanted to keep it as a separate piece.
  • Tossing up between making the skin lighter or darker cause the tan didn’t feel right. After a bit of discussion with artists (who share similar feelings towards ZJ’s design), I went with the latter. Effectively made him black-coded with the dark skin and hair locs. I quite like it, I just hope the wrong crowd doesn’t find this.
  • Pulled inspo from 80s skater fashion with the loose print tee and skater jeans. T-shirts of that style usually don’t have different colour sleeves, so I just made it all white.
  • Moved the red from the original sleeves to the added gloves.
  • Coloured the shoe soles white (in a revision) since the yellow from his original helmet was gone and didn’t make sense to keep.

If and when I do draw this design again, I’d like to tweak the colours of his hoverboard to better fit this redesign and give him a bag to carry all his spray cans. Definitely lost the loser boy energy along the way, now he’s actually cute lol

#bloons#zee jay