comic-book style character needed

Infinite State Machine

We are a startup software designer, and phone/pad/web shop, usually work in games and iPhone software, but also work with educational applications.

Think you have the style of Oeming, the colors of Quitely, the panache of Mignola, the empathy of Watterson? Enter our contest! Calling cartoonists, comic-book artists, game character designers, graphics pros, or just people who like to doodle. Bonus points if you know who those artists are!

Children from very young (3/4) to teens, focusing initially on the younger end of the spectrum.

We're looking for a cartoon, comic-book or game-style character to be the narrator of an upcoming educational software title. The character should take the form of either a girl, boy, animal, robot, alien, or other anthropomorphic creature.

The character must look good at lower resolutions, say roughly 100x100 pixels, as well as larger - say roughly 500x500.

The character must be somewhat identifiable and modifiable in age. This means that you should be able to draw/render the same character as if it were young, up to an 'adult' version of whatever your character is. Obviously, the younger version of your character must appeal to younger children as the target audience. Please provide 3 versions of your character; your character as if it were 5 years old, the same character at 10 years old, and at 15 years old.

The character must be animatable, as if it were in a movie or game, to walk, talk, run, jump, etc. We're not asking for animations (yet), just create the character in such a way that it could be animated, taking both artistic and technical issues into consideration, whatever those might be.

The character must be on a white background.

Accepting raw hand-drawn sketches, water-color painting, illustrator/computer rendering, 3d, whatever. Just make it look cool.

If you win, please be available for future work.

Thanks, have fun!