Crow Hags

Trying to get back into the habit of illustration again, I'm going to try start with a new sketch every few weeks. Just for fun I'm going to spit out a few fantasy concepts that have been rattling around for a while.

When you hear a particularly nasty crow cawing, I just love the purity of the expression, even if it's the sound of something repugnant. One of our new neighbours calls across the street to her dog in what sounds to me like a similar sound, so why not bring both ideas together and create a cackling hag? For the sake of redesigning a classic fairytale trope, why not make three together? For variety I made their profiles exaggeratingly different.  I wanted every aspect of theirs to be gnarled, decaying, tangled, torn and messy.

The bottom left was the first iteration, I like the idea of semi-beast-like people who scrounge in the didrt for herbs and have tanlged branches in their hair. Each of them uses a shawl differently as an element of the elderly. There's something unsusual about an elderly person's nakedness, so I felt the partial clothing might emphasise that. Of the walking canes I had a last idea to make the heaviest roam ponderously on imporssibly tiny canes, feet dangling even.

More to come soon!

Savage Priest of Rheorek

Inspiration can strike anytime, anywhere. I pride myself on my ability to be able to sit down, and with the right music, invoke its power on command. Many times though it feels like a spark from particular items. This was an idea inspired by the growling vocals of Psycroptic which reminded me of a rabid dog growling in tongues. But what's gnarlier than a snapping hound foaming at the mouth? Foaming at two mouths! Some kind of double-reflexive jaw spitting out curses could make for a pretty cool cultist.

Xotl, Inter-dimensional Sentient Hypercube

Another Pantheon of Fiends addition, Xotl is the corporeal manifestation of a piece of alien technology so hyperintelligent, it synthesized DNA to grow itself a biological body from it's cube form (Centre Chest). The idea was originally inspired from some kind of creature with only a brain for a head, overemphasizing the supporting tissues like the sternocleidomastoid to give it a unique silhouette for all that psychic brainpower. Its conception was found in bands like Fallujah and Rings of Saturn

Blood Suckers!

If I had all the time in the world, I would revisit every trope you can think of in storytelling, and challenge the conventions to try to re-envision it in a way you hadn't thought of before. I know it because it's the feeling I chase when I see something extraordinarily cool in a movie or game and think "damn that's clever, why didn't I think of that???" This is one such idea for a vampire as a withered husk, intending to gorge on blood like a mosquito. I'd really like to paint it up sometime, so show off the translucency of the heart bulging with blood, like the mosquito's thorax.

Endless Teeth

"Dont' let the bastards grind you down." This is a quick and dirty render of a creature I couldn't stop developing. I wanted to play with the idea of some kind of inexorable abomination that's all gnashing teeth at every angle. The pinkish appearance is meant to look kind of like he's made of gnobbly gums all over, and inflamed around the gnarly molars used as clubs. For extra effect, his inner torso should look like a fleshy tongue to savour his unlucky victims. Even with all the added accents, I can't help but feel it could use more character/details. Or maybe I've just been staring at it too long...Anyways, The whole idea was inspired by an album by "The Red Cord" called "Fed Through the Teeth Machine."

Pouaki

Always moving and sketching is important to continual growth. That's why Sho, David  and I have dug up the weekly sketchgroup again, this time with a narrower focus. Every week one of us will pick a random creature from David's big book of mythological monsters, and with a limited timeperiod, we'll jam out a quick sketch how we would envision it. So for this week, we've chosen the Paoki:

In Maori legend, Pouaki is a monstrous bird that hunts for people and livestock. Its predations were ended by the cunning plan of the hero Hau-o-Tawera who caused his people to fashion a great net in which to trap the bird. Waiting in hiding, they baited the trap and entangled Pouaki in the net while stabbing it to death. A similarly named bird, Poukai, who may be the same being, is similarly trapped by a pair of hunters led by Pungarehu who travels into the Otherworld after many people have been taken away by it. They chop off the bird's wings and find the remains of their fellow villagers, but on their return they find that all their relatives have died or become much older, since their time in the Otherworld was longer than they had imagined. 

I've decided to create a burly, muscular looking monster that looks strong enough to carry people away. I referenced some shark elements as part of a lot of Maori environmental threats, built around the body of a golden eagle, and shaped the wings like those of a sleeker seagull.

Alien Marauders

I have an idea for a race of underground invaders based on a cross between wasps and ants, with the physiology of gastropods like shelled sea-snails. The idea is of a hive of varied creatures that can interlink with one another using specialized extremities in their soft tissue to form more complex creatures. This also gives the attack forms the ability to swap between a number of simpler organisms that function like living weapons. I'm doing my best to exaggerate forms try to come up with unique silhouettes. Seeing as how ideating the crux of a new concept is one of my favorite parts of the process, I figured I'd show some.

Gnoll's fair in love and war

This hyena-like creature I modelled from a sketch of a Gnoll I did a few weeks ago. I've learned quite a bit more about Zbrush, and have started working with zspheres to work from armatures. Unfortunately my trial is gonna run out soon, so my next step is to start dabbling with Maya!