Thursday, 31 December 2015

Creature Design - Burnt Cat and Peter Han

Creature Design #6

Overview
There are no cats in Bloodborne - my view was that perhaps they were viewed with superstition (like during witch-hunts) and were rounded up and burnt. Thus, this creature would be one that escaped and/or survived the flames, though disfigured.

Peter Han is an artist who primarily uses brush-pens with great skill, though he also uses watercolours. He advocates dynamic sketching, understanding the form of the creature you're trying to design.

Research




Process
Pencil sketches to get out initial ideas - burnt, disfigured, hunched, melted. Then I drew cats from images on Google - hairless sphynx cats, a manx cat, and a decayed, dead cat from an article I saved. Pencil, then thin brush-pen, and then watercolour. I only have a few colours so it limited my palette and forced me to consider each colour carefully.

Further watercolour sketches - cats burnt in a wildfire, and two more sphynxes to show their range of movement. I then combined all the elements I liked from previous images into a final watercolour creature design - hairless, burnt and bleeding, with huge paws and a partially disfigured face.

Reflection
  • Useful to break away from digital into a forcibly limited colour palette (12 pans in a field sketch set)
  • Personally find it useful to draw things traditionally first; it gives me a better sense of the proportions
  • Traditional art (especially pen/paint) makes each line count, as it cannot be erased
  • Useful to break away from digital and experiment with other mediums
  • Eventually the process would speed up as the pencil would become unnecessary


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