For my own personal creature description I want to create something heavily inspired by monkey, mainly just because they’re goofy and I think I would enjoy creating something similar in shape. Right now at this moment. I don’t have much in mind of how I want it to look so it might be a struggle ☻
RESEARCHING ANIMALS
I’m gonna explode I love monkey. I just decided to look into some videos of their behaviour and how they function before I start deciding on my description. From these monkey videos I then decided to go look into beetles, very different but I thought it’d be cool to try and combine the ideas together.
STARTING DESIGN
To begin, I just decided to note down bullet points of a rough idea of what I wanted. I would write a 2 paragraph describing all the small details of this creature but right now, the brain ain’t working. I went ahead and slapped together some images for a mood board:
I just went into silhouette designs, I decided to take 3 of these and expand them through playing with tones and textures. I’ll focus on the texture and design for now and then the colours so I don’t try and do too much all at once.
While I was scribbling these down, Henry came around and asked about the design. I got a positive reaction to the idea but I just need to think harder on how these elements work. This is where I needed a description to describe these creatures, luckily from my research on how beetles use their strength to toss each other around and looking at how goofy monkeys are. I’ve kind of gotten an idea:
DESCRIPTION
These creatures are the bullies of the rainforest always looking to pick on someone or something to fight, from a distance we see one of them leaping from tree to tree , most of their colour blends in with the environment but the fur around their neck making them stick out to each other. It only stops when it lands on the same branch of it’s kind. It gets in a stance with it’s hands and foot gripping tightly onto the tree, as they both come closer to each other they try to knock each other off with the horn on the top of it’s head like a rhino.
As one of them loses their grip after being pushed around, it falls from a tall height and landing onto the cold wet floor, luckily for it’s exterior like armour. It recovers after a few seconds and let’s out a dramatic cry trying to get sympathy. The winner continues upwards looking for their next fight.
DETAILING WITH TONES
Instead of detailing them all I wanted to break them into sections, I followed by choosing 2 that I liked and detailing them more as well taking some elements from other designs that I really liked.
Here are the two designs I have came up with in tones, from here I’ll go and explore some of the colours. As mentioned in my description it blends in with their environment apart from the fur around the neck making them stand out to one another.
TESTING COLOURS
I can admit choosing colours is not my strongest skill but we slowly improve on this. I just go into some funky colours and slapped in some of the patterns from other animals onto the fur or shell, reality is that I should’ve tried combining the two final designs from before and then go into colour but I work differently and it’s funky town.
FINAL CONCEPT
I’m pretty bias to this colour palette mainly since I’m in love with the colour red, I was told 1 and 9 had better contrast but I just adore this colour palette. If I went with the 5th one, I got was to make the beetle shell have more contrast with the fur or give it a shine (will try this out when playing around with substance) so if you see anything funky with the colours in future blogs. I’m just playing around with it.
ENVIRONMENT DESIGNS AND POSES
For my environment, I collected a moodboard of what I wanted it mainly to look inspire by and then a few greyscale drawings of how the overall pose of my creature will be posed like along with the surrounding. Enjoy the collection of pictures below that I’ll use in future posts to refer back to ☻
