World-Building Project

Currently we are in a mini-project stage, four weeks to research our topic and come up with a result at the end of it. I considered drawing a specific creature as though it was from various cultures, or from various environments, and see how it affected the design, or picking a few obscure creatures and trying to modernise their design.

Instead, during deliberations with classmates, Jim informed me of a sci-fi writer named Hal Clement, and how he wrote stories (such as 'Mission of Gravity') based around designing the world first, and populating it afterwards according to the effects of gravity and the environment and such. This seems like an interesting way to design creatures (certainly something I have never tried), so my project will likely be to design a world, paint a section of it, and then design a few creatures that live there (probably an apex predator, a rival predator, and a few sources of food/herbivore creatures). As I also have an interest in writing, I will give the world a short backstory as to how it got to its current point, and how some of the creatures have adapted to its changes over time. I will also consider how they hunt, interact and co-exist with one another.

Today, I have been to the library to scope out prospective sources for later research, when I have a better idea of what my overall topic is (as I expect it will get whittled down after more consideration and practice), and I think looking into the origins of monsters and mythical creatures might be both helpful and interesting. I briefly looked into a book of Ancient Egyptian design and found a painting of a sphinx type creature almost immediately, so looking into ancient sources is certainly viable. I am aware werewolves and other prominent creatures in media are very old concepts, so it would be interesting to see how many of the most popular creature designs are from a similar era, or tied to distinct events in history that kept them in public knowledge (witch-burnings being particularly notable). 

Perhaps it is not their design that is important, merely the idea behind them? Werewolves probably represent the duality of man, which was an extremely strong idea in the Victorian era (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde being an obvious example), so they might have become a forerunner of creature designs during that age. Or maybe even earlier since they also represent a darker side of man, which would have been feared for far longer. It's definitely something to consider looking into; the origins of a creature and then when it became most prominent in human history, thus imprinting its design into our mindset.