I know I said that this week's post will be all about lovely Greek mythology but I have one last thing to show you from the Inuit section of our project. In my last entry I had finished colour iterations on a creature called Quailertetang, weird I know. The seal is Sedna's servant.
I was looking at leopard seals for the body design, after doing those colour iterations I chose to stick with a similar colour to leopard seals as it worked for the character best. So I did finally get the Quailertetang final painted on my iPad using the Procreate app, which is pretty fab I would definitely recommend it.
Right, that's it I promise. Now we can move onto some Greek mythical creatures! I know that everyone knows a lot of the creatures and characters from Greek myth so that's why I have chosen to try my best and make the designs unique.
The first creature on my list is a Sphinx and even though it was an Egyptian creation the Greek version has one difference, a female head. In Greek mythology, the sphinx was considered to be a woman. One sphinx was only considered to exist in Greek mythology; she was the daughter of Orthus, and either Echidna or Chimera. And as everyone knows she would tell riddles to travellers in order to let them into the city of Thebes.
These are some of the images I found on Pinterest to inspire me. I sketched some designs that followed the more recognisable features of the Sphinx, like just a woman's torso and head on a lion's body and eagle's wings. I did have a more interesting idea as well. This was to make this creature into like a lion centaur and feature more of the human side of this creature. Here are some the sketches I worked on.
After establishing my idea for the Sphinx I isolated the character down to a silhouette and used that to decide whether or not to choose certain features; like have big or small wings. The use of value studies personally helps me to see what works in terms of values, which leads onto colour, simplifying the process.
The colour palette for this character was determined by the value studies above. Georgia and I chose the bottom right as the light body contrasts with the dark coloured wings. By doing values I knew that I had to have a light coloured body; similar to that of a lion, and dark wings with light speckled effect.
With a clear picture in my mind I moved onto testing some different colour palettes. First of all I did a range of different coloured fur and wings. Once I had done that and chosen the best palette for this character I moved onto individual iterations for the wings, as they were brown I added in some blue as an accent colour.
Before painting the final for the Sphinx I was struggling with lighting so I began with thumbnails in greyscale so I could figure out which lighting worked best, in the end me and Georgia thought lighting from above and behind worked best.
The Final:
