Forest Character Development - Lumberjack

One of the character ideas that came out of the forest scenario was a lumberjack. It fits in well because it obviously relates to forests but also relates nicely to the northern most states of the USA which is the guest country for this years event, as well as giving a good topic for narrative which would be deforestation.
I wanted to create a simple looking but bold character taking inspiration from the simpler animations on my design context blog.

From the concept drawings I created this more finalised version of the lumberjack and used it to make a few different expressions shown above, giving the character some more character. I then took these drawings into illustrator to vectorise them and give them some colour, basically just playing with the style to see what might work better in flash. 

I first made a line drawing with the pen tool and then live painted the whole thing, taking away any outlines that were not necessary to show the details of the character. In doing this I have simplified it as much as possible and I really like the style. It reminds me a lot of the 'samurai jack' simplified style but with a slightly more rounded feel to it. After this I played with a few colour variations to see what looked best (pretty much just in the beard area). 

I still think that the lighter blonde/ ginger original colour is the best of the lot as I think it represents lumberjacks more for some reason which I'm not sure about. Next I went ahead and drew out the other expressions of the lumberjack and then coloured them.

In the above example you can see the coloured images with the outlines. I think they look a bit too detailed for the simplified style that I want to create which was inspired by the animations like Orefu, Docteur Tom and ORLEGI . Below shows all of the line drawings and the coloured versions without any unnecessary lines.