I'm a participant in the Beasts of 9 Creature Contest. One of many, and I've been looking over the entries. I mean no offense, but it's been a fair few that really wowed me. It might be that my expectations are very different from a lot of the other contestants, but a lot of them aren't specifically impressive design-wise.
Is it a little big-headed of me to pretend that mine is better, or the best? I think yeah, it is self-serving, a little. But I prided myself on Googling a dozen shots of the monsters, and perusing (not merely
using) the official website, which (as luck would have it) featured a clip of one of the monsters, the Seamstress, in action. I watched the original
9 short film, and did more thinking on this drawing than I've probably put into any other single drawing in several weeks.
Partially out of narcissism, I decided to outline my thoughts on the matter, along with some common themes, the evident design laws that I saw. I apologize in advance for sounding like some bloated windbag, but I rarely feel like I have such a clear look at my own creative process and wanted to document it.
1)
The glowing red Eye. Looking at the monsters that are shown in the preview, you'll notice that all of them have at least one glowing red eye. It's a common feature, and has its basis in the origin of the beasts themselves. It's a fairly obvious suggestion, I think, but a good start. I only mention it because I didn't notice in during my preliminary sketches.
2)
Animalistic features--all three of the beasts that appear in the trailer have specific animals they at least partially borrow their appearance from. The Cat is the first, and has the least in common with its base animal (being that it's partially bipedal). The Seamstress (the one with the doll face) was evidentially inspired by a cobra, although it has certain traits borrowed from an angler fish. I have the least amount of experience with the Wing Beast, but it's pretty clearly a large predatory bird--an eagle, if I had to guess.
3)
They're not symmetrical. A lot of really beautiful designs are marred by their uniform construction. I saw one that was a spider with legs made from old-fashioned church keys. The problem, though, is that each of the keys was identical, and gave the impression that the monster had been manufactured
en masse as opposed to constructed from incidental scraps and garbage.
4)
They're not heavily mechanical. From what I've seen, there's very little mechanical parts to any of the beasts; the biggest deviation is the Wingbeast, which uses an old-fashioned desk fan for propulsion. Most of their weapons are pretty simple. Claws made from scissors, exacto knives, erector sets. Chainsaws and power drills seem pretty elaborate compared to the simple manual tools most of the beasts are constructed from.
Designing the Hermit I sat down to work on the contest basically as soon as I found out about it. After a few noisome doodles trying to get these things in my head, I decided to kick around Google looking for an animal that I could co-opt. Considering what I'd seen, I thought a non-mammal would be best. Mammals are fairly relatable and I felt it would undermine the creature's monstrosity; even the Cat doesn't act particularly cat-like, with sudden, reptilian movements that make it seem more like a raptor.
I had a couple ideas, but I really liked the idea of the hermit crab first. So I drew four simple hermit crabs, looking for a pose that I liked, with the idea that once I'd done a rough of the crab I could just drop found items over the top until I had me a creature.
The first two drafts looked pretty rough; the first was too symmetrical and ended up looking flat, the second had its body drawn too tall and looked more like a grotesque shrimp. But not wanted to make too much work for myself, I inked it, and after making some detailing mistakes and poorly choosing a shell (originally a rusted bucket), I decided that I would completely redraw my crab.
The third draft looked good (this drawing morphed into
Hermit Crab 2 ). I really liked this drawing; but there was something off about it. The actual beast didn't seem dynamic enough, it had a very poor silhouette. The antenna overlapped the wrench but didn't extend past it, and the right eye/circuit seemed too static.
The fourth and final drawing (seen
here succeeded in presenting a more dramatic silhouette, although the bottle irritated me by being much flatter than the original. However, the omission of the cork on the bottle was something I liked, and together with the slightly more dramatic linework I decided it would be the preferable model.
Transferring it from my sketchbook to my computer without a scanner was a trick and a half, but I think that's a story for another time.
So what do you think? How well did I adhere to my rules? Any changes you would suggest to the drawing or the rules?