Creature Design - The Giant

Overview

This creature stalled a lot during creation, but eventually came through as a gentle giant. Reminding myself of a favourite documentary helped immensely to finish this creature to a respectable, realistic standard, and it's now one of my favourites instead of something I regretted trying.

[Unnamed properly as of yet.]

Inspiration

Creatures:

• Bull
• American Buffalo
• Golden Takin
• Elephant
• Nudibranch
• Snail
• Nautilus
• Ammonite (Extinct)

Other:

• Sundew Plant

Considered:

• Hammerhead Shark
• Fu Dog (Fantasy)
• Dunkleosteus (Extinct)
• Diplocaulus (Extinct)

Belated Afterthoughts:

• Walrus
• Barnacled rocks

Process

The Giant started out as an attempt to revive the fu dog/diplocaulus creature I'd begun with at the start and abandoned due to lack of direction. Later on, I left this creature design again as I didn't know how to progress in it. Each time, I came back and persevered and eventually everything worked out.

Original idea, hammerhead shark/diplocaulus/fu dog. Though some of the shapes are interesting, nothing was inspiring enough to continue with.

 

Favoured sketches from previous page on the left. Added in the Golden Takin as a source of inspiration due to its domed head shape. Righthand sketches are where I included bulls and nautilus; this is why the horns are swirled, to give the spiral shell pattern on the side of the head.

Final lineart. Of the two coloured sketches, the left one is where this creature stalled again. The right one, with more depth and feeling, was when I came back to it. Continuing it as a bland, sharkskin-esque texture felt wrong - elephant skin was soon taken as an inspiration and the design propelled from there. This is why the righthand lineart has elephant trunk lines on its head, as I had completed the left image by then and was preparing the second lineart for the same.

During colouring, I had to invert the textured background as it was too overbearing on the colours I was choosing to use, and I couldn't see the edges very well against the sandy tones. The blue it happened to invert to gives these creatures a very cold, arctic feel, as though they are stalwart wanderers of the snowy plains, and this idea and visual may have influenced their colours subconsciously.

Final design.

Design Notes:

• They have no eyes. Their foraging depends entirely on amazingly strong senses of smell, touch, and hearing.
• The tentacles on their backs are covered in sticky, sap-like fluid, as are their tail-tips. The tails are used to lash out at prey/foliage, and deposit them on their backs, where they will be devoured. The back-tendrils have serrated edges and towards their base they excrete extremely viscous, strong stomach acid to dissolve whatever matter they have collected.
• Horns are not used in combat with each other. It is thought they aid in communication though, as these creatures often greet each other with side-on head-touches.
• Even if crippled by the predatory horses or other attackers, these creatures are still efficient hunters due to the long, swift reach of their tail. Herds will often stay with an injured/paralyzed member and feed them a share of collected food.
• It is thought they call in extremely low frequencies, as nothing audible is present to human ears. The cat-like Ribas will vacate treetops hours before these creatures will pass by; it is possible they can pick up on the low frequencies due to using some themselves, though not on the same scale.
• These giants are mild mannered creatures, despite being voracious omnivores. Captive animals can be trained into what they are allowed to eat. They are particularly useful for hauling timber, and some have even been trained to strip bark and branches from the logs also.

Reflection

• Extremely useful creature to design; not only is it fairly different (especially with the addition of elephant skin as a texture, unused before), but it proves that designs that aren't working can always be turned into something good if you persevere and are willing to make changes.
• Belatedly realised walruses and barnacled rocks might have been useful to look at whilst colouring. A stronger visual library will fix this.
• Elephant-like skin is very tedious to draw (though maybe not quite on the same level as scales), but I really like the effect and will probably use create it again.
• Drawing a side-on creature and then one on a diagonal immediately afterwards was challenging, as some of the design were happy accidents (i.e. a Difference layer being used over the horns with colours that happened to make it much more appealing) that I then had to figure out and recreate. It was very useful to figure out the processes though.