My main idea was to recreate the picture in the style of a newer Bomberman game, Bomberman R, given that those designs were more appealing. I chose to draw from Neo Bomberman, because I never played on the NEO-GEO, and Bomberman was the only game that I had a connection with, through a lot of the Flash games. Essentially, it was me, of the Flash generation, referencing the NEO-GEO generation in the style of a Next generation console game.

However, I had to compromise a lot for me to get to the current result. Originally, I already did the lineart for White Bomber a few weeks ago, minus the thing at the back of his head. But, I did this just before I stayed at my Uncle's apartment. Given that I don't like people messing with my work or bothering me about it, I decided to leave it at home for what was 2 weeks.

I also scrapped the Black Bomber because I thought I wasn't in the same flow as when I worked on the White Bomber. Just recently, I realized the thing that made it hard for me was that his head shape wasn't spherical, like the White Bomber, but more of a cube shape, which didn't work out with half of his face gone to the side in the reference.

Another thing that I originally wanted to do was use shadows and highlights like how they (Bomberman R characters)were presented in the advertising. But I just found it harder to do, so I just stuck with the flat colours of the game. To achieve that, I mixed colours to be close to the original: For the face, I mixed peach and yellow; for the torso, I mixed blue and purple; and for the boots and gloves, I mixed red and magenta.

Reference:

Win screen from Neo Bomberman

Side Note: I've realized that most of my best art required me to use references, so I'll start using them more in my art