John Silver from Treasure Planet (3)

After visual development for the character Billy Bones, Harald Siepermann continued with one of the main characters from Treasure Planet, Long John Silver.

In the visual development guide Long John Silver was described as a charming, charismatic, roguish alien pirate leader. A ‘big’ guy, physically imposing, in his fifties. A cyborg, with a mechanical arm, leg and eye.

Harald Siepermann found Silver quite a complicated character to crack. He worked about 2 months on the character to find the right direction, “Silver, being a pirate, disguised as an innkeeper, half alien, half pirate, was a bit too much to design in one go, something was always right, other things were always wrong, so I decided to design one thing at a time. I neglected the cyborg-part in the drawings you see here [below], to concentrate at the warm and father like, yet evil pirate. Pure evil hidden in normality, profanity.”

Below is another series of designs:

… and another series where the character seems to get more defined: