"Sholi: The Candy Bear"

I am working on various character personalities and designs for Pink Laughter Kingdom. This illustration was created originally in Flash CS3 and taken into Photoshop CS3.

Sholi [SHOW-lee] is a panda-like bear creature that inhabits the world of Pink Laughter. He lives on a diet of candy wish sticks which possess and contain many magical gumball candies. In the image, he is on his way to his hibernation cave and home where the interior walls are completely embellished and covered with tons of tantalizing candies and sparkling multi-colored jewels and stones of various displays of brilliance.

Sholi has magical powers and invokes these powers through the gumball candies. When he is ready to create magic, Sholi will go into a very odd, kooky but playful ritual dance, where his peculiar-shaped, double-jointed arms and legs will begin to flail about in a hypnotic fashion.

As he is doing this dance, his glass-plated belly, which stores and makes many gumball candies inside, will start to shake and rattle all of the contents. Eventually, this will cause Sholi to give off a very forceful hiccup and from that hiccup; he'll release some of those gumball candies.

The gumballs can then be given to others to eat. The color of a gumball represents the magical property it holds, so the person, who ingests a gumball, will be temporarily endowed with the magical property of the gumball.

The expelled gumballs can also be planted into the ground and they will eventually grow into other candy wish sticks for Sholi to dig up, carry off in his cave and indulge in.

Sholi, the candy bear, is obviously a very very self-reliant and mysterious creature.