Ghost Turnaround

Following the advice we got about cutting and pasting drawings to complete a turnaround, as well as the redlines from Neil, which were really great at breaking all of our designs down into their essence to re-solidify exactly what made them what they were, I started on a turnaround of the wraith, as I felt that -given the way I'd originally painted it up, it would be really hard to turn into a turnaround.

I was so wrong that I would've made a politically correct, conservative, young-to-middle-aged mother blush;

I hit a few small snags along the way, but after redefining the lineart it was surprisingly easy to pull together.

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Now to get that tar monster finished.

Final Designs for 1st brief

I cannot believe how inspired I was when the clock struck 10.
Something came over me and I suddenly had this urge to completely repaint the wraith design I was working on using a brush I've never even touched before.

It was easily one of the funnest things I've drawn in a while.

Oh, and here's a slight edit to the tar monster.
I gave him a more expressive face, so now he looks a lot more recognisably uncomfortable.
I also messed around with a few layers of colour burn and colour dodge thanks to Sultan's advice.

This was a really productive evening!

Tar Monster Paint

Here's one of the paints that I was working on this afternoon.
It took me a while to get started because I was unsure how to fit together the aspects of the designs that I - and everyone else - seemed to like into it.
The good thing is that I managed to get there in the end.
The bad thing is that my digital painting skills need a lot of work; doing this made me realize how rusty I really am.

It was a pretty good exercise in using photographs for colour reference, though
I kept the image I was using as colour reference in the top left corner so that it was easy to see what I was working off, and I feel like I managed to get the tar to both look - and feel - like tar. My main problem with this picture is to do with the way I rendered the bubbles; My skill at rendering different kinds of reflective surfaces is really bad right now, so I'll probably need to practice that sometime next week.

Now to do the wraith...

More References and Ghost Thumbnails

The next thing I did was look at different ways that ghosts have been designed in modern media. The second monster I wanted to design was going to be one, after all.

Specifically, I wanted to explore the idea of the 'wraith'; one of the more aggressive ghosts often associated with death;

From the research I did, the most common attributes of a wraith are a long, flowing cloak, a cowl covering most -if not all- of the face, only exposing an eye or two, and occasionally the mouth. The colour of the wraith tends to vary very little as well; most are coloured a shade of grey/ blue/ black, with highlights that tend towards red or blue colouration, emphasizing once again the relation of a wraith to the idea of death.

Given that wraiths are so strongly tied to death, I asked myself,"Hey, why don't I explore some designs that people will recognise as somethIng like the Grim Reaper?" 

The following designs kind of stemmed  from there.

I also wanted too try and capture a personality that was sort of mischievous, highly aggressive, quite haughty and bordering on evil. Some of the designs feel much more solidly 'evil' than others, so for the sake of tying them all together, I'll say that this was an attempt at designing a 'bad guy'.

Admittedly, I thought the scythe would be a silly addition, so I didn't try incorporating it in any of the designs. 

Now all I have to do is finalize the design for each monster and paint them up.

In Depth Research and 1st Set of Thumbnails

So I decided that the first thing I wanted to get done was the first set of thumbnails for the Tar Monster.

The first thing I did was gather references for the general design of a tar monster;

The most common traits I could think off was that they tend to be a lot more 'solid' than your standard slime, probably because Tar is naturally much denser. Aside from that, the general shape remained similar across the board: rounded, soft edged and amorphous -to varying degrees.

With these things in mind I started thinking about what sort of character that I'd be creating.

I knew that I wanted to make the monster an introvert, as -being a giant blob of tar- I expected that he wouldn't socialize much, and if he did it would get incredibly awkward very quickly.
I also wanted to make him appear misunderstood; fearsome but not to the point that it becomes scary. Kind of like a gentle giant that's insecure about his size.
Finally, I wanted to make him insecure about the fact that he's made of tar. Admittedly, this is an easier problem to tackle when you start to consider posing, but I tried to reflect it in the designs nonetheless.

I used purple as a base colour as I thought that it would best reflect the idea of tar. I'll go into a bit more detail as to why I made this choice when I get to expanding on this design.

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I decided to expand on 2 of the above designs after talking with Neil about them. The set I've got now feels heaps more comprehensive;

There are about 4 designs here I'd really like to work up, but one of them just seems to speak to me; the one in the far right column on the second row.

I'll start thumbnailing the ghosts before I start fully going into painting that design up, however

Research for First Brief

The first task we were given was to design 2 monsters, going through the full production pipeline in the process. It's a bit out of my element as I'm not going to be used to thumbnailing different versions of what a character could look like before going for the final version -I tend to just draw it straight and only keep the design if I feel it works, if not I just scrap it- but it will definitely be an interesting experience.


To start off with, I thought about what types of monster I wanted to do. Given that I'd expect most people were going to go with something a bit more tangible and solid, I decided to look at some designs that were more akin to my favoured style of drawing; things that flow and have a natural sense of dynamism.


As such, I settled on 2 types of monster that I felt would both be fun for me to try and draw and to characterize; a ghost and a slime.

Granted, the slime was something I want to vary a bit in terms of its design, as I feel like I can better represent its character if I make it out of tar;

• Tar is quite dark in colour, so it should reflect a pessimistic personality
• Tar is also thick and gloopy, and has a much denser structure than slime, which is a lot clearer and more aqueous
• Tar is much much more tencious and sticky than slime, and is a lot harder to get rid of while being vastly more toxic in the process. 

You can see that I've pretty much already sussed out the slime's character just by thinking about what material to make him out of.

As for the ghost, I have a /few/ ideas, but I'll need to draw them up first before I can figure out what works best.

Watch this space.