Alien Fisherman - Concept

As the title suggests this is the first instalment of a series of developmental blog posts chronicling the conception, refinement and finalisation of an alien fisherman.

I've been needing a concept to develop into a 3D sculpt for my research assignment and showreel and this is he. I knew I wanted a classic alien-looking character and I was gathering images from Star Wars and old kids shows like Plasmo for inspiration. Despite presenting my eyes and brains with such delicious eye candy I really wasn't getting any good ideas so I fell back on my method of just drawing shapes until something is spawned upon the canvas and voila! it worked once again - I was given this as

a starting point:

Click to embiggen.

I was really liking the design at this point, he was unique and simple. Now, I honestly don't know what lead to the next stage of this guy's design but I decided that I wanted him wearing wading trousers. Wading trousers are hilarious, the image of huge pants hanging off a slim frame by means of only two shoulder-straps has always tickled my funny bone and it makes for a distinct silhouette so, go time.

Click to embiggen.

Obviously drawing baggy trousers is not one of my strong points but he was starting to look more like a character, and that was all I wanted at this poi

nt, I knew I could stress over drawing good-looking wading-trousers once the concept had been finalised. Of course, now we have a fisherman without a fi

shing rod which is... unprecedented to say the least. I knew I didn't want him to have a humanoid fishing rod as I feel like I'd just be placing an alien head on a redneck fisherman which would seem more like a shallow punchline than an interesting character.

Click to embiggen.

Regarding the fishing rod (which I'm referring to as a "rod" purely for my own ease), the mechanism works as such; the end of the rod emits a force which holds the bait in place and also emits a light which shines a spotlight on the bait attracting the fish. Once the bait has been bitten the indicator lights on the shell of the rod signal as such and a button is pressed which projects the harpoon out, piercing the fish.

And so, after a few more minutes of colouring and about thirty or so minutes total, I present the concept of the alien fisherman:

Click to embiggen.

Creature Of the Week #187: Murderous Intent-Gnixxian Assassin - Part III

Click to enlarge.

She is complete! The creature I have dubbed "The Venomlash". All that has been done since my last update was the reconfiguration of his chest area and a lot of finishing touches. Here is my description (which is required for every entrant in these Creature of the Week competitions):

"The Venomlash is a natural assassin; in the wild it would crouch behind it's forearm plates and blend in to the lush, vibrant vegetation of the planet Gnixxian and wait until it's prey within rage before whipping its incredibly powerful barbed-limb at the poor creature and stabbing it with it's poison-filled tip, killing it instantly.

The Venomlash were initially only hunted and bred by the citizens of Gnixxian for their poison which coated every blade and tipped every arrow but recently, factions have begun warring against one another on Gnixxian and Venomlash are being trained to kill the opposing factions. Camouflaged with paint, the Venomlash are stationed in select areas and are instructed by their trainers to kill on sight. A single Venomlash is capable of taking out an entire platoon of Gnixxian soldiers."

If you'd like to check out the other entrants here is a link to the finals thread.

Hopefully this becomes a regular occurrence and additional hopefulness for me getting at least a couple of votes.

Now, back to Chime.

Creature Of the Week #187: Murderous Intent-Gnixxian Assassin - Part II

Click for full-size.

As you can see the concept has been fleshed out much more since yesterday. I still need to refine the area where his back lets connect to his torso but other than that it's looking pretty good. I've created a time-lapse gif of my work today, I was only able to add five images (out of my seventeen layers) so I'll walk you through each one to give you a better idea of what I went through.

1. This is the image I thumbnailed yesterday, resized and placed on a white background - nothing special here.

2. I added two colour balance layers in Photoshop to mess

around with colour schemes. The idea for this creature is that he blends in with the lush, al

ien environment of his planet and once something gets too close it whips out with its stinger-face and injects venom into them. I could have gone for any colour scheme given this logic since the planet is alien the flora could be any colour but I decided upon pink/purple because purple is a colour naturally associated with poison and pink works nicely with it.

3. Took away that rib-cage area of the creature and gave it more of a prominent feature on its stomach which could be used to hold venom.

4. The arms were looking really wonky at this point so I decided to increase the size of his forearm plates and duplicated his right arm over

to replace his left arm. I also added some stripes along his face and neck to give him some more visual appeal and added some more colour to his chest area.

5. The colour has now been removed from the chest area! The arms were still looking wonky so I moved his right elbow to a point where it woul

d make sense and now he looks much more comfortable just standing there. I blocked in the colour of his forearm plates since they were annoying me and I shall work on them a bit more in my next session.

A couple of people over on the ConceptArt.org forums seemed to like my A thumbnail so if I get time I'd like to render him out in the same way as this creature here.

Stay tuned for Part III of Murderous Intent-Gnixxian Assassin.

Creature Of the Week #187: Murderous Intent-Gnixxian Assassin - Part I

Here are my thumbnails for the latest C.O.W:

Here is the full brief:

"Bring to life a creature whose sole purpose is to take life. The Assassins are a special breed of creatures from the planet Gnixxian, a lush and dangerous planet, hunted and used as special weapons against those that have earned the distinction of being high priority hard targets. Your design can range from a small creature that kills in inconspicuous ways, to a stealthy

hunter that overwhelms its prey with strength and speed. As usual, get creative, and it probably wouldn't hurt to show your creation in action."

They're actually less thumbnails as they are progressions of how I came up with the idea for the concept D, an evolution chart of the murderous intent-gnixxian assassin as it were. To give you a better understanding of my workflow I'll detail the steps I took to get to the final design:

I started by searching for references of animals that I would consider to have assassin-like qualities but the only real animal I could think of was the Whip Spider so I typed "natural assassin", "nature's assassin" and "assassin bug" into Google and found some very cool results such as a spider aptly named the Assassin Spider, check it out:

Horrifying, huh?

I then began sketching using the common features that all of those assassins shared i.e. thin legs, small abdomens and cold, dead eyes. Using this method I ended up with Exhibit A - something resembling what it would look like if a Tyrannosaurus Rex had a headcrab for a head. I wasn't too fond of anything in A other than the front legs... or are they fangs? I wasn't sure but I copied them over to the right began sketching again, after a short while B was created. At this point I still wasn't liking anything about the design other than the legs (which I refined a bit more). Once again, I copied the legs over and took a new approach which ended up looking a bit like a scrab from the Abe's Odyssey universe:

Once C had been finished I noticed that the legs didn't really fit the new torso and head (both of which I was quite fond of) so I duplicated C in it's entirety and reinforced the forearms, gave him stronger-looking hind-legs and added some cool finishing touches such the poison dripping and the stripes across his head and legs.

Overall I'm happy with the design. The next step is to go over the concept with cleaner, more defined lines and anatomy to get it ready for colouring.

Stay tuned for Part II of Murderous Intent-Gnixxian Assassin.

Art Dump: Creature Concept Art

Here's some of my past work:

A concept I did for ConceptArt.org's Creature of the Week; the brief was "The Creature that Changed Mankind's History".

Saw-head.

Golem

Brief: Capable of a high-level of mathematics; employed by some secret U.S. government agency; consumes bacteria.

Creach & Kidd: Concept for high-poly advanced character design.