Rhapsodies

Today’s sketch is some concept designs for Sun Wukong aka Monkey and all of his companions from Journey to the West. I’ve always liked Journey to the West from a beautiful children’s book version called “Magic Monkey” (Can’t find a reference for it. It’s probably been out of print for ages) to finally reading the Anthony Yu translation very recently. It’s a story with seemingly endless material for doing great images.

Even though the source material generally describes Monkey as mostly human shaped, I usually prefer to keep him as monkey like as possible usually going with a Macaque as my starting point though I suppose I could just as easily go with a Golden Monkey.