Christianne's Art and Comics: creature designs

Showing posts with label creature designs. Show all posts

Saturday, June 6, 2015

Creative Process (or "Stealing Like An Artist")

I'm deep into an illustration gig right now, and unfortunately, I can't show much of it. I'm gonna show this piece, though, because it's got a fun story behind it.

The description for this drawing wanted a Chinese man, dressed simply, kneeling in front of a shrine and cutting away vines that had overgrown it. Behind the shrine was to be a plague demon. The shrine was easy enough to think up. This doesn't have any photo references. I just drew it from my head. The plague demon was another matter. I didn't want to step on the toes of a certain very litigious game company who have a prominent plague demon in their IP, so I asked my client for some guidance. He suggested I look at viruses. So I did. I looked at Ebola. I looked at streptococcus (which is technically a bacterium), I looked at HIV. None of them really fired my imagination. But then I remembered this thing, which I ran across for another project last year.

This is the penis of a bean weevil. The bean weevil, like many insects, reproduced by "traumatic insemination," in which the penis penetrates the carapace and spews reproductive materials all over the insides of its "partner." Basically, they're rapists. Insects are fucked up. Serious nightmare fuel.

In any case, this photo accompanied one of the wikipedia articles and I knew I had to save it for my morgue, because that's a Lovecraftian horror, right there. I wound up flipping it for my drawing. Flipping images is a common practice among artists who want to disguise their source, but for me, for this drawing, I flipped it because I already drew the other main figures and I wanted it facing them. Besides, I'm owning up to the swipe right here, and it's an image in the creative commons of wikipedia anyway, so I don't need to disguise it. I'd feel bad about it if I hadn't run across a blog post about the great French cartoonist, Moebius, and his use of photo references. I'm not in his class, but, hell, if it's good enough for Jean Giraud, it's good enough for me.

Anyway, my drawing is brush and ink on bristol.

I'm trying out Patreon as a means of funding my blogs. They don't have a widget yet, so this link will just have to do. If you like my writing and art and if you'd like to support Krell Laboratories and Christianne's Art and Comics, please come on over and pledge. Thanks.

Friday, January 9, 2015

Your Lion Eyes

This is for another game commission. Brush and ink on Bristol.

Friday, May 16, 2014

Creepy Crawlies

Here's the last batch of creatures for my big commission. I'm finished. Finally. These last ones tended to be creatures I had no real grasp of. I don't know how closely these match what the game developers had in mind, but this is what they got from me, barring any unforeseen revisions. As usual, these are brush and ink on bristol. By the time I got to these, my inking style was beginning to become a bit more design-y than on the earlier drawings, but it works well enough.

The creature at the head of this post is based on a scorpion and a centipede, but it's a fantasy creature at its core. I had a hard time envisioning this one, even after I was provided with some older concept drawings.

This was an excuse to draw a human being after drawing so many creatures. Another creature based on a centipede, though one that spits acid.

This is an amalgam of a number of different creatures, mainly crabs, spiders, and scorpions.

Finally, a plant. This turned out better than I expected. All those years spent drawing botanical illustrations pays off.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Creatures and Textures

Here are more creatures. By this point, I was exhausted, so some of these aren't all that I want them to be. All of these are examples of me working out how to create certain textures with pen and ink. India ink is such a binary medium, sometimes.

The beastie at the head of this post is a kind of anteater whose hide is covered with rocky scales. I tended to approach drawing this guy as if he was Ben Grimm, the Thing, from The Fantastic Four. I envision this guy as being orange for some reason.

This is a fire-breathing lizard. A salamander in the classic sense of that word. Based on a couple of different monitor lizards, including the Komodo dragon. Drawing the scales on this was an exercise in tedium. Creating art is a job, after all, and all jobs have long periods of tedium. I'm sure I spent way more time on this than I probably should have.

The brief for this was for a six-legged cross between a boar and a horse. Weird. Not entirely unsuccessful. The game this is for is partially a miniatures game and I've seen the green for the miniature this corresponds with. While I was drawing it, I thought of this guy as a hipster boar for some reason. I think it's the beard.

Finally, something legitimately alien. These beasties are a land-based coral that create gravel around themselves. Another drawing where I spent a lot of time on tedious details. This one indulges in pointilism, which is always a chore to draw. I like the end result. I sometimes like the idea of being an artist even when I hate creating art.

Only a few more to go after these, and then it's back to comics.

Monday, May 12, 2014

Beware the Jub Jub Bird...

Some more creatures as this project grinds toward its end. I'll have a couple of more creature posts in the next day or three. The image at the head of this post is a winged carnosaur. Fanciful. In the game, it's called a Jabberwock, which I guess I can see. Fun to draw in any event.

Send in the Cavalry (More creatures)

Here are some more drawings for my current commission. The piece at the head of this post is a saurian cavalryman. The one below is a British cavalry man on an unconventional mount.

Creatures de Jour

So my inking brush crapped out and I had to buy a new one. The piece at the head of this post is drawn with the new brush, and it's been a life saver. I hadn't realized how miserable I was fighting with the old one to get a good line. The art store was out of the brush I wanted, so I settled for a Loew and Cornell brush. I'm having the damnedest time finding Winsor and Newton brushes right now. Grrrr....

Anyway, I'm finding a groove with these drawings. Brush and ink on Bristol board, as usual. The drawing in the pole position is described as a giant spiky insect. It has other effects in the game, but those don't really influence the depiction.

This is a variant of a bombadier beetle, whose poison actually ignites on contact with the air. A dangerous beastie.

This is a horse that's bred to be more like a pachyderm, with feet that are more like those of a rhino than a horse.

And another flying dino, one that is described as "storklike."

Enjoy.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Another Creature Post

More creatures. I'll be working on this commission for a while. There are 47 drawings in the project and I'm only half-way through right now. Once this is done, it's the end of the Exile and then a couple of other projects I can't talk about right now. Anyway, these are ink on Bristol board as usual. I've been fighting with my inking brush, which is probably on its last legs. I don't think it has much life left in it, unfortunately.

The image at the head of the post is a sabertooth, of course, in the game itself described as having stripes. I've gone for more of a bobcat look than a tiger look, but it's hard to avoid the comparison. Stripes and all.

Even More Creatures and Such

My partner and I went to see Tim's Vermeer this weekend (a film I wrote about back in March after seeing it at True/False). One of the things that the film does well is demonstrate that even when you're using mechanical shortcuts, making art can be incredibly tedious. In the film, Tim spends over a week painting dots to represent the weave of a carpet. I can sympathize with him. Art is hard, boring work sometimes. Some people romanticize art, especially if they themselves are accountants or actuaries or some similarly mundane profession, but let me assure those people: my job can be just as mind-numbingly dull as yours.

A case in point is the above drawing for my current commission. It's a lizard. Sure. You would think drawing a lizard would be fun. But look at what I've done to represent scales. Nothing but dots. I don't know how Drew Friedman did it for all those years without going bonkers. Fortunately, I like the end result.

In the game mechanics, the lizard lives in this bush, which is based on an aloe plant.

And just to assure you that art is also often fun, there's this. It's an exploding ant (which has some basis in nature). This came together really fast, in part because part of it entailed splattering ink on the page, which is always a blast. I know a lot of people roll their eyes at the artistic worth of Jackson Pollock, but his methods are a gift to artists of all kinds. Seriously.

Anyway, enjoy.

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Badger, Crab, Weird Thing.

Some more RPG illustrations. One thing this gig is good for: exploring ways to make textures with brush and ink. I'm having a blast creating surfaces in these drawings. Sumi-e ink on Bristol board.

This last beastie gave me fits. It's described as a "spikejawed sandhog" a critter related to ceratopsians, but not one. I did a dozen pencil sketches before I arrived at this. Vaguely modeled on a warthog.

Thursday, April 10, 2014

Trikes and Willows

A couple of more drawings for my big RPG commission. The brief on the trike is for a pretty standard triceratops. I drew this twice, because the first version looked uncomfortably close to an awesome drawing by Bernie Wrightson. This bad boy is a little bit on the heavy side, which comes from looking at a lot of pictures of rhinoceroses, the closest living animal to a trike. Maybe he's just big-boned. The tree is a willow, of course, but in the game it's a particularly nasty creature that whips anyone who comes under it as a means of implanting seeds in an incubating host. Hence the skeletal offal at the base of the tree in this drawing. The drawing itself flirts with impressionism, which is fine. Both of these are brush and sumi-e ink on Bristol board.

Sunday, April 6, 2014

Orchid and Ankylosaur

More stuff for my current illustration gig. One of these is a fanciful carnivorous orchid. Flowers are wonderful because they lend themselves to marvelous abstractions. The other drawing is another dinosaur, this one also based on an ankylosaur, but a very different, less spiky version. These were both brush and ink on Bristol, with a bit of Pitt pen on the orchid.

Friday, April 4, 2014

Fanciful Creatures

Here are some more drawings for my current RPG contract. I'm drawing a lot of insects and dinosaurs for this commission, which would please the hell out of the twelve year-old me. I drew a lot of dinosaurs when I was a kid, and now I'm getting paid to do it. Dream big, kids. They come true some of the time. I'll be doing drawings for this assignment for a while. I think there are 47 drawings all told, of which I've done about a quarter of them.

The brief on these: the ant is an ant, obviously. In the game, it carries an electrical charge, hence the glowing spots on its carapace. The big critter is a variety of ankylosaur, used by the game's lizard people as a draft animal. This is an example of combining existing animals in a drawing to make the resulting fantasy animal credible. This draws from several types of turtles and lizards. It has the head of a snapping turtle and the legs and feet of a Galapagos tortoise, along with some other influences from horned lizards and ankylosaur fossils. It turned out better than I expected. The caterpillar is described as a "crawling wig," and when I went looking for references for such a thing, I turned up this! I went to pains to avoid just copying the real thing.

The ant is brush and ink and Pitt pens on Bristol board. The dino and "crawling wig" are entirely brush and ink on Bristol board.

Friday, March 28, 2014

Process

Here's another drawing for my current RPG commission. I thought I'd throw in a work in process scan to give you an idea of how I go about making pictures. I drew this in pencil on a piece of bristol board. Mostly, I just blocked in the shapes and tried to get the anatomy of the beastie right. I don't start thinking about details until I start inking. In this case, this critter was described as a chameleon, able to change colors like an octopus, and in the game it's practically invisible. This is not easy to draw, and I haven't managed it, really. Black and white isn't really conducive to this, but it did give me the idea for the skin patterns while hiding in tall grasses. I ink with a brush these days, which is still kind of amazing to me. Inking with a brush used to seem like voodoo to me, particularly when I would look at people like Berni Wrightson (who drew his astonishing Frankenstein illustrations with a brush). Necessity drove me to brushes rather than the crowquills I used to favor and now I'm completely comfortable with them. Practice makes perfect, I guess.

Anyway, this was fun.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

More Creatures

Here are a some more creatures for the RPG commission I'm working on right now. I'll have more of these pretty soon. The top one is another feathered dinosaur, though one that's more overtly a dinosaur. The other is a giant flea. Insects are insanely fun to draw, especially fanciful ones where I can cut loose. The first drawing is entirely brush and ink. The big bug is brush and pen and Pitt pens. Both are on Bristol board.

I'm trying out Patreon as a means of funding my blogs. They don't have a widget yet, so this link will just have to do. If you like my writing and if you'd like to support Krell Laboratories and Christianne's Art and Comics, please come on over and pledge. Thanks.

Christianne's Art and Comics