Creature design demo

I covered for Jay Lincoln's Character Design class today and did a bit of a creature design / brainstorming demo. Mainly I talked about digital thumbnail sketching and shape / silhouette construction. I even tied in a little bit of Gestalt principles too. I think I spent about an hour and a half putting this stuff together, and probably 20 - 30 minutes minutes of that time refining the fish a bit. I hope to work on it some more.

Isomorphic correspondence, anyone?

Plus, I think I introduced Jay's students to the Mekong river delta catfish. Hoot hoot!

What a rad planet. Thanks guys!

Moebius Redux

So I can find it later...
Moebius Redux

Color squid

Here's a colored pencil version of the Leachia squid I posted earlier. I spent maybe about 2 hours on this, possibly less. It helped doing the detailed pencil drawing first. I'm trying to keep things pretty quick lately. I really like the anatomy of this squid's tentales. Normally they (or more conventional squids) have 8 main tentacles and the 9th and 10th remain within those and project to catch prey. With the Leachia it looks like tentacles 9 and 10 just hang out. I don't think the other 8 could conceal them well, but maybe the squid can move some ways I'm not picking up on.

Two squidlike looking things...

Here's a roughly started color pencil/marker sketch of another version of the huge maggoty thing from Robert E. Howard's The Valley of the Worm. Normally I would be posting this over on Literary Debacle but I'm putting it here because it helps to illustrate my point about how I typically handle color rednering. This drawing is even a little conservative compared to past caricatures and self portraits (which happen to be in Syracuse. I'll photo them sometime to show). It's a fun drawing at least and I was playing with some white paint markers I got (and I got some black prismacolors again too. It's been years since I've had them and they changed the small point nib! It's an improvement).


This is the first result of drawing from the deep sea creatures book I got from the library. It's fun! This strange looking squid called the Leachia squid. It's body looks like a cross between a rolled tortilla and a tied balloon. It's nearly translucent too. Later on I'll post a color sketch of this same squid I started last night. Color drawings from good reference can be alot easier than making stuff up.

Which leads me to say, reference when drawing is great but it can be limiting too. The freedom of imagination, or the ability to draw upon things you understand about form and anatomy is sort of freeing (freedom is freeing, chew on that chumps!) Being too stuck on reference seems like needing a permission slip to start any drawing... balance is rad.

Bug Reference!

I just found this website the other day; North American Insects and Spiders - Cirrus Digital Imaging. There are tons of good resolution creature images in there and some good descriptions too (like the June Beetle's forelegs are adapted for digging. Excellent news!) Anyways, as I mentioned the other day that I was in need of bug reference, this is a sure good start.


Here's a June Beetle from www.cirrusimage.com. I think it is dead in this picture, but it probably lived a happily buggy life.

The one downside to this is I don't like drawing from photographs. Since I haven't done too much life drawing lately I may have a rocky start, but nevertheless full steam ahead. Until we get some thaw and the real deal is crawling around outside I'm stuck with bug photos. A minor downside.

What's cool is the collection is all creative commons licensed. I don't know the specific ins/outs of the page but I think you're allowed free use of the images so long as it's not for profit. Woo, pretty cool. Copyright laws are getting a work around lately and creative commons licensing is an interesting beast of the times. I don't know if I would release anything of mine under cc, but it's cool that it exists.