ILTN3012 - Negotiated Project

I revisited the Kappa, creating a final piece to represent them as a deadly lake monster, as was in the Japanese myth.   A detail in the myth that should not be overlooked is the fact they are adept sumo wrestlers and haul unsuspecting people into the water, as well as animals, making them deadly killers. To accommodate for this,, I opted to use a low stance that make it appear the Kappa the ready to strike. Different to how I worked on the Minotaur, I created a shadow map and a colour map to reduce the drawing time. The downside is that it is likely to lose saturation or colour to a higher degree since the shadow map is set to multiply. After combining the colour map, the stance and physical makeup of the creature is much clearer, showing muscle definition, the turtleshell, bill, and the head sink. Only colour correction and adding subtle details were needed to finish this. The Kappa would appear to be assassin like, which is the kind of stance and feeling...

I revisited the Minotaur in order to create a finalised design that represent the creature in some form. Given I am investigating creature from a game perspective, it is quite important to draw the creatures so that they have a visual impact. For context, in video games, players come across "boss enemies" which, by design, are meant to feel as though they are strong and formidable, or by the very least, deadly. Composition of my work was important so as to draw the creature as a powerful being, so there were a few methods to achieve this.     For the digital process of the project, I will be using PaintToolSAI. The Minotaur is obviously quite large, so emphasising the muscle structure along with his stance was the most direct solution to creating some energy for the creature. I did consider introducing a much smaller human character for the creature to interact with, which would have touched on video game pop culture especially those of fantasy RPG games. This...

Golems originate from Jewish mythology, in which a being is animated using elements and objects that are otherwise inanimate. This includes dirt, mud and rocks, and can be made up of almost anything in the fantasy genre. Blade & Soul Terracotta Soldier, Blade & Soul. [Video Game], NCSOFT. Since golems can literally be any shape or form, the can practically be presented as human statues. The only differences in such a case is the single colour usage for the entire design of the creature, as is the case for the terracotta soldier from Blade & Soul. It is assumed that this is a man-made object due to the game's lore, but there are more dramatic designs available in the video game art industry. SoulWorker Asphalt Golem, SoulWorker. [Video Game], Lion Games Studios. SoulWorker sports a number of golem creatures. The most notable is the Asphalt Golem as in the image above. This is a more apocalyptic take on the concept of the golem, possessing roadw...

Hydra, Dark Souls. [Video Game], From Software.   The hydra is a similar mythical creature to the dragon in terms of the general head structure. It originates from the myth in which a nine-headed serpent haunted the swamps of Lerna during ancient Greece, and was capable of spawning two more heads from those decapitated. Heracles was said to have destroyed the creature with help from Iolaus. When it comes to video games, most of the hydra's aspects are the same when it comes to textures, builds and body features. The differences are the number of heads that it has, the fact that it is never airborne, and that the head type can be slightly different. Typically, the features between hydras and dragons bear obvious similarities. The immediate difference is the structure of the creature - hydras have more heads than one, and also lack the wings. In many games, they are bound to the spot and found in water, so it is sometimes unclear as to what is beneath the creature. ...

The dragon's body parts are borrowed from many different animals in the world. As such, I found it best to focus on different segments at a time to understand the anatomy of the dragons.   Early sketches involved trying to recreate the correct anatomical build of the dragon, which included the upper body and the appendages. Drawing nodes is important, as it allows me to draw in the bulk of the body parts more easily. The main body of the dragon seems much harder to replicate.   The most complex areas were parts involving scaled patterns. These tend to have jagged shapes and are well crowded. These borrow from either turtle skin which is more pointy, or snakeskin which is flatter and glossier. Due to my experience with games and media, pointy dragon skin is far more familiar to me since it is more common, so my practices reflect textures that are derived from turtles. Pentadactyls, being the wings, are also a challenge to draw accurately. I found drawing the wire m...

Dungeons & Dragons. [Role-playing Game], Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson Dragons are a recurring mythical creature that is very popular in fantasy video games. They possess many different physical traits that are borrowed from serpent creatures. The appearance of the dragon in mythology can vary by region, but almost all variations tend to have horns, talons and wings in their anatomy. Several depictions of dragons also say that they are capable of breathing fire, or similar elemental projectiles. Western dragons generally differ from eastern dragons due to culture. The dragons inspired by western legends tend to be grounded creatures that are bulky, but the dragons of the eastern legends are usually longer in length and also float in the air. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. [Video Game], Bethesda When players are introduced to dragons in Skyrim, they appear as grand creatures with many of the common associations that pop-culture has with dra...

  Given that Medusa was a gorgon, and gorgons were reptilian hybrids, I did some anatomical sketches of humans and snakes. More specifically: the upper body of female humans and snakes and their textures. I needed to become familiar with how to draw snakes. This came in two parts: The structure of the snake, and the texture pattern of the snake. Drawing the general shape of the snake is fairly straight-forward since it is pretty much a pointy cylinder. Drawing the path of the snakes helps to make the width consistent Snakeskin textures are essentially repeated tessellated shapes. Cross-hatching and shading work best to create these patterns. The main difficulty with drawing this is the task of conforming to the path of the snakes body, which can become complicated due to pattern skew and changes in direction. I was already particularly comfortable with drawing humans, so it generally was an experiment with attaching the torso to a snake's tail and trying to find a metho...