fandomocdndart

I’ve seen the headcannon run around that Wujing is amphibian, not aquatic, which made me think he might make an interesting frog or mudskipper. These are both, however, incredibly silly animals, and all my sketches of them looked ridiculous. My next thought was salamanders, who, being very lizard like, can more easily make serious characters. Ultimately, when the eel made him look a bit more “man but blue”-coded, I went with a Moray eel for his face, and mudskipper like fins+coloring for the rest of him. I like to think that in world this would give him an extra layer of “dear god what is that thing”, since most Yaoguai can easily be compared to a specific animal.

I also gave him a liuxing (a type of meteor hammer) instead of a monk’s spade. As neat as some designs for his spade are, I think the idea of the three main weapons in JTTW being “stick” “Pointy stick” and “very pointy stick” is a bit… it’s fine. If I ever made my own retelling, I’d give Sandy a meteor hammer and Pigsy a three-section-staff to spice up the fighting a bit. Wukong of course gets to keep Ruyi Jingu Bang.

Sandy’s gills were a huge struggle, technically, eels and skippers don’t have gills, but the idea of a sea monster without gills sat weird with me. I ended up giving him a “jaw” line and a subtle line under it that could be gills or not, depending on how important they were to a scene. I did the same thing with his eyes; both eels and skippers have partially exposed eye sockets, so they’d stick out quite a bit. I thought this made him too jarring, so I made him a little more lizard-y and just gave him some heavy upper eyelids (he could get some wings down so good with lids like that).

His pants were awful to figure out, I wanted him to already be wearing monk’s robes, but of course, those would be impossible to draw under water, and then I couldn’t draw shirtless fish. In the end I went for a style of Shaolin combat pants with a simple travel tie above them to explain why they don’t bunch up around his knees. Sandy is a very intelligent boy indeed, he probably figured out that trick far faster than I did.