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Anime artist dad turns young sons’ sketches into awesome animation character designs

Casey Baseel Jan 24, 2017
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Concept art was apparently too good to just put up on the family fridge.

It’s safe to say that when young children draw pictures, their parents see the finished product through very different eyes than the rest of the world. Sure, the rest of the world might look at the paper and see nothing but ill-defined shapes or scribbly shading, but to a doting mother or father, sparks of creative genius are sure to appear.

That’s definitely the case with animator and artist Thomas Romain. A French national by birth, Romain currently resides in Tokyo, and has contributed in various capacities to anime series including Aria, Basquash!, Symphogear, and Space Dandy. An artistic streak seems to run in the family, as Romain’s sons also enjoy drawing pictures of characters they’ve thought up on their own. Romain then takes their designs and polishes them up as awesome, professional-grade artwork, sharing the results in a series of tweets he calls the Father and Sons Design Workshop.

The project kicked off on Christmas Day, when Romain’s older son submitted his concept sketch of a monocular alien, which Dad then fleshed out into its muscular finished form.

原案:息子
イラスト:パパ
親子共同作品が楽しい。子供のアイデア発送が素晴らしい。 pic.twitter.com/zFLeDGlJ0M

— ThomasRomain ロマン・トマ (@Thomasintokyo) December 24, 2016

Next up was a design by Romain’s second son of a cyborg who’d have been right at home in the ambitious space opera anime of the early 1980s.

親子イラスト[その2]
原案:次男
イラスト:パパ

1980年代っぱいサイボーグ。懐かしい感じ。

Cyborg.
Concept design : son
Illustration : father pic.twitter.com/9SnVMSRslK

— ThomasRomain ロマン・トマ (@Thomasintokyo) January 8, 2017

Switching genres, Romain then shared a multi-armed magic knight, with each hand wielding a blade of grimoire, as originally envisioned by his oldest son.

▼ The face-in-the-torso anatomy is evocative of hair-pullingly-difficult classic video game Ghosts and Goblins.

親子デザイン工房(その3)
マジックナイト🌟
原案:長男
イラスト:パパ

Magic Knight🌟
Original design : my oldest son
Illustration : father

The next one will be scarier! pic.twitter.com/gWLegLFiOj

— ThomasRomain ロマン・トマ (@Thomasintokyo) January 15, 2017

Romain promised that the fourth installment would be scarier. We’re not sure whether the resulting steampunk doctor really qualifies as frightening (unless you’ve got a massive fear of oversized needles), but it’s pretty cool nonetheless.

親子デザイン工房 (No.04)
スチームパンクの医者
原案:次男
イラスト:パパ

Steam punk doctor
Original design: son
Illustration : dad

Have a nice, creative day! pic.twitter.com/E92yaAbXcV

— ThomasRomain ロマン・トマ (@Thomasintokyo) January 22, 2017

Romain sings off on the most recent entry in the series by telling us all to “Have a nice, creative day!” Here’s hoping that he and his offspring will too, and that they’ll be back with more of their family’s team-effort artwork soon.

Source: Jin, Twitter/@Thomasintokyo

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he’s feeling a little guilty for never designing an awesome robot for his dad.