Côca

Designer: Jason

The Côca is a boogeyman-like creature that is said to eat misbehaving and naughty children. There are records of a song that's sung to protect a child from the Coca, telling it to “return to the roof”. This was a very influential detail in this design. It’s pumpkin head might remind you of the traditional Halloween pumpkin, but it is actually associated with “All Saint’s Day”, and a tradition in the area of Beira-Alta and Viseu of carving faces on pumpkins, lighting them with a candle and carrying them on sticks in a procession at night.

This Moodboard started with images of ghosts, pumpkins, and depictions of a cape that shares a name with the Coca. This wasn’t enough, so after some sketching, I also added some pop culture scary characters and creepy-crawly animals.

The thumbnailing process had many iterations. I started with more humanoid shapes, but none of them were approved. I had to get more creative with my shapes, and went very out of my comfort zone, and I'm glad I did.

The sketching process also had a lot of iterations. Along the way I also did some small variations to the thumbnail.

For the body, I chose shades of blues and browns that resembled the skin of corpses. For the pumpkins, I looked at real pumpkins for variations in color, using greens, oranges and yellows.

Due to the complexity of the character's anatomy, the model sheet was made with assistance of a 3D blockout I made in Blender.

The Callout sheet focus on the creature hunting and the way it moves.

This image doubles as a Dynamic poses sheet and a VFX sheet. It displays the way in which the creature eats a child, the magically turns their soul into one of the pumpkins staked in it's back.