Mini workshops - Grasshoppers - figuring it out

These are some of the photos I took from the start of this workshop. I was originally going to illustrate cockroaches but something drew me into doing grasshoppers instead. First we had to draw our chosen insect 10 times realistically from reference, I struggled with that but I got through it.
We then had to characterize our insect with 10 more sketches, that was a bit more my thing.

I got stuck with this workshop for a while, I just could not get the characters to look the way I wanted them to. Once again cartoons and films saved the day and gave me the inspiration that I needed.

The first character that came into my mind when I started this brief was the grasshopper from James And The Giant Peach, I always loved that character and they way they animated his mouth was pure genius. Whilst drawing my grasshopper characters I thought about the many different segments that made up the body and face and how I would deal with them, this character study from the film helped me understand just that.

Whilst working things out (see sketch folder) I
started drawing the grasshoppers with square heads, automatically I thought of Invader Zim and started looking at the characters from the show. With these two studies in mind I was ready to start building up my image.

This was my first mock image for the workshop, I was at a point of frustration and I couldn't get a composition down so I drew this up. I actually like the character and the text isn't bad but I feel like it could be more than this, stronger. Also I wouldn't say that a single character is enough considering a cloud of grasshoppers is a massive swarm.

Here are some progress shots of my newer image, thumbnails for this can be seen in my sketch folder. This one is a lot stronger and I feel like the composition just works a lot better, I feel like I have explored this character a lot and pushed it to it's very limits and I am really happy with it. These guys look like they could work as a cartoon, maybe I could adapt the design to look like a title card.

The image on the left was my first finished version but I soon decided that the gradient in the background was too distracting, the orange clouds were originally chosen to stand out in contrast against the green characters but I also changed that. The image on the Right is my final version, I might play with text colour but apart from that I am content in saying that this workshop is complete.

The characters have been explored a fair amount already in the build up to this but to really polish this one off it would be nice to mock up a title card as if this were a cartoon!