Last week I showed the Sphinx creature I've been creating concepts for. My mentor Will Coyner always offers me advice on improving my designs and gives me feedback so I can make some necessary changes. I was unsure about the Sphinx design, including lighting and pose for the final, so I sent my designs to Will who then sent me this feedback:
I took Will's advice and in the end chose the bottom sketch to work upon for the final in greyscale. When we discussed whether a greyscale painting is enough, 3/4 view and orthographics make the design easier to understand and break down.
Below is a rough painting which is as far as I've got with this character so far. At the end of the 5 weeks we have set aside for the Greek culture we have some time after to go back to some designs and improve them for portfolio use.
One of the other creatures I've chosen to design is Cerberus. There's not much I could change to make this creature different, as the three headed dog of the Underworld it's pretty recognisable.
For some of the first ideas I had I did some quick digital sketches. On the first page of ideas I was trying to merge multiple faces onto one to make the design slightly different but still be the well known creature of mythology.
On the second page I tried to sketch out some more classical designs of Cerberus with it's three heads as well as some more alien like designs and a design with skulls for heads.
When me and Georgia discussed the look of this character we both liked the designs with decaying features on the face and bones sticking out on the face. With this in mind I drew up a new design for the faces of Cerberus and iterated upon it.
Georgia preferred the bottom left design as did I, however in the final design I wanted to add some more features from the bottom right design as well. The final for this creature turned out more sketchy than I wanted initially so in the next few I will probably go back and improve it.
By Wednesday I had moved onto my third creature, the Harpy. In Greek mythology Harpies are winged monsters with ugly faces and sharp claws. For this design I wanted the Harpy to be mainly bird like, with only the face humanoid. So to begin I started with silhouettes I drew over and iterated upon.
After deciding with Georgia on the best design I drew up some orthographics then started iterating the designs more. Out of the iterations I did the one I liked most was the bottom left whereas Georgia liked that one and the one next to it.
I worked on some rough colour experiments after that to see which colour combinations worked best. In the end we both preferred the bottom left, as it looked creepy and strange with the blue tinged feathers.
I think for the final for this creature I could have chosen a better pose which illustrates the creature more instead of hiding the body behind the wing.
It's been a busy week and I managed to get started on another creature on Friday. This time I was working on the Manticore, which is a lion with multiple rows of sharp teeth and a scorpion tail.
I wasn't sure where to start with creature so I began with working on how the face will look as certain features like the teeth can be iterated. I started with drawing a regular lion and changing some of the features. I wanted this creature to look odd, as it's a weird mix of animals I wanted it to look like that.
Out of these designs we both preferred the nose on the first design, the horns from the third and then most of the facial features of the last design.
This is what the final design of the Manticore's face will look like.
I didn't want to spend too long on colour experiments as I wanted to keep quite close to the majestic lion look but with some odd features.
I chose the bottom right colour palette as the scorpion tail and horns don't look as out of place as they do on the other designs.
I really enjoyed painting the final for this creature which isn't usually the case. However I think this final also needs to have touch ups like darkening the shadows and adding more detail.
Well that's it for this week, I know it's been a lengthy post but I actually did some productive work this week. See you next week!