The Udder Audacity Of This Cow Guy

While I was young and playing with toys in order to tell stories, Super Sheep was one of the only original characters I'd ever made at that point (well... besides maybe Antler-Man and Octo-Guy, who I originally made in LittleBigPlanet 1, but I'll cover both of them at once next time), so he didn't really have an enemy of his own he could go fight, in part because he was too busy fighting in other people's battles and being inserted into other films where he isn't needed. This would go on for a good long while until I went to my first Comic Con in Liverpool during the year of 2016 where I would end up getting this question mark box that contained a random assortment of goodies (Ironically, despite the fact that the box was themed after the question mark boxes from Super Mario Bros, none of the knick knacks were really Mario related from what I could remember), one of these random goodies ended up being this cow plush based on the cows from the Harvest Moon series which from what little I know about it, is a series of games where you do farm work:

ah yes, this random non assuming cow from a cutesy farming series would make the perfect villain for an epic tale where a blue cartoon sheep has to save the world

From that moment forth, Hex Moother was born... Although he wasn't always called Hex Moother at first, since at the time I had a different, much less punny name, as originally, he was known as Cow Guy! (oh the creativity... or rather lack there of) This name would stick around for quite a while (even bleeding into some of the early art I did of him):

ah yes, back when the theft was a lot more blatant

Eventually however, while we were having either lunch or breakfast (I can't really remember which meal it was) in a Wetherspoons in Southport, My dad ended up suggesting that I could call the character "Hex Moother" instead (since he would be the Lex Luthor to Super Sheep's Super Man), so I decided to change the name due to how much better it was than plain old "Cow Guy"

With Hex's early design (as you can see in the picture above), you can really see the Harvest Moon influence due to his pink collar (much like the one on the toy he was based on), his lack of any items of clothing (besides the collar that is) and even the fact that his eyes are just a pair of ovals, this design choice is very much unlike what I did for other characters (past, present and probably even future), since they all have more detail put into their eyes, although some character that would come after Hex Moother such as Retroval Starforce and even Ruff Bup and Rick P. Rison would still be designed with the less detailed oval eyes:

Yup, I guess you could say that Hex Moother may have paved the way for future oval eyed characters (if you want to find out more about Ruff Bup, check out my entire website dedicated to the production of my FMP by clicking Ruff Bup's mug)

Some of the key differences between the original toy and my design (if we're being nit picky) are that I gave him brown hoofs instead of peach coloured hoofs (the same goes for his horns), he stands on two legs while the Harvest Moon cow stands on all fours and my character decidedly lacks actual ears, although it doesn't affect his ability to hear anything because of the powers of cartoon logic!

Regardless of this however, it was actually when I was in Creative Media Level 2 when we were all in the Mac Loft before the big Corona Rona hit the scene where one day, I'd decided to finally ask one of the tutors (who is sadly no longer with us) whether or not some of the Super Sheep characters (namely Super Sheep, Hugo, The Night Pig and Hex Moother, since they would have been the most likely to run into problems with copyright if I wasn't careful) would be ok as they were in regards to copyright law (because I don't want to end up getting sued once I start making the Super Sheep franchise, no matter how many jokes I make about it), and surprisingly enough, he ended up saying that they'd all be ok since no one would really know these characters were based on these existing works (based on what I remember anyway, I could be misinterpreting his words), so Super Sheep, The Night Pig and Hugo would end up being more or less left alone, but as for Hex Moother, I decided to re-design him anyway because I still felt he resembled his inspiration a little bit too closely to risk leaving him be. As a result, I got to work drawing the re-design, and this was the first result I got:

Hex Moother finally managed to purchase some actual clothing. Too bad it doesn't look so good

Yeah, while there were elements I ended up liking about this design such as the hat, his coat tails and even the little bow tie in place of his collar (the staff wouldn't have been part of the actual design, that's because I was also envisioning what the staff would look like for one of the other characters), I ultimately decided that it wasn't good enough due to the orange and yellow colour pallet. I didn't think it would really be befitting of an evil villain like Hex Moother, so I decided to do something I rarely get to do (but should try to more often), and that's doing a second re-design of the character. The results here ended up being much better as you're about to see in the image below:

There we go. Much better

For this design, I ended up going for more of a security guard outfit mixed in with the coat tails from the previous design (which themselves wouldn't quite make it into the Dreams model because painting them and getting the physics right proved to be too difficult for me at the time), you can see this because I gave him a small yellow medal which he wears on his purple jacket. I also decided to change his collar into a nice pink belt instead because I felt it would be much better than giving him a bow tie, plus it serves as a bit of a call back to the original toy I based him off of. The hat from the previous design also got recoloured to fit the new purple and blue colour scheme I was going for when drawing his new outfit (which ended up being his final outfit, as I finally got to depict the character in the music video I did for "Escape From The City" from Sonic Adventure 2:

This is currently his latest appearance in any of my projects, because Super Sheep in Hexo's Exos has been cancelled (or at least postponed until next year)