Week 5 - Monster for Halloween

This week for Halloween we had to design a monster concept. First I researched some various horror and fantasy monsters to give me a good idea of the kind of direction I would like to go in.

I really liked the gargantuan ideas of a very large monster. I also really liked the fleshy and spindly creatures which would fit more in the horror genre. Even though we were supposed to start in our sketch books, my main goal this week was to complete a concept quickly and for that I thought I would start by using the silhouette technique. I tried to very quickly get some initial designs down, spending no more than 5 minutes on each.

I tried to keep them very loose and concentrate a lot of form and pose as they seem to be the most effective. From here I decided to pick my favourite three and go into more detail with them to then decide on which one I would take forward into the final design. I actually liked quite a few of them. The top right has an ape like stance but appears to be a wolf with angel wings. One of the claws appears to be some sort of glove. Even though I like it, it doesn't seem that original overall.

The design under that on the right of the middle row has a very interesting pose. It's like a zombie lizard-man. I liked this one too but it's fairly generic. The first of the final three I decided to go with is the middle row, middle image. I like the spines and the broken flesh in it's midriff. It has a spiked weapon arm and huge fist as the other. The others I wanted to take forward were the two in the bottom row. The first I like the pose as if it were to strike. Maybe some kind of lizard demon. The last I picked because I really liked the sense of scale and that it was really a huge rock giant.

I took those three, enlarged them and added the grey details within the silhouettes to get a better idea of the forms.

It took a little longer to do these, but I tried to not spend too much time and keeping the strokes loose and more to get a general form idea rather than add in too many specific details. From this I quickly ruled out the lizard one with wings as no matter what I did to it - it didn't really look that interesting to me. I was torn between the other 2 to take forward. I decided to proceed with the gigantic rock monster. Even though it is fairly generic in my opinion, it has a much more interesting form than the humanoid demon. I enlarged that again and added more greyscale details.

When I was pleased with the general shapes and contrast it was time to add paint. I used a Colour layer initially over the top to get in some rough desert rock shades in. I then added some rock textures in various Hard Light layers and fit them in and turned the opacity down to blend them. This step really sped up my design and gave me the extra depth the rocks needed to make them look more realistic. I then added a normal layer to paint over the top. I added a backdrop and some wispy sand effects to complete the final look.

I am really happy with how it turned out. The whole process took me much less time than the gun I had designed in a previous week. I kept the style, details and the paint very loose and tried not to get bogged down in the details. In my opinion it not only looks more stylised than my previous concepts but also has very rough paint strokes over the top, looking haphazard when zoomed in, but detailed when viewed at a distance.