Writing and thumbnails.

I have currently finished the writing for the creature book, which includes the introductory and world-building chapters, plus all of the in-depth descriptions for each of the creatures.

Here is a sample of one of the creature descriptions and how each of them is set out.

Brain Bird. 

Stats.

Name—Brain Bird.
Other names – Bird-in-the-hand, hypnowl.
Height – 5-6”
Wingspan – 9”.
Hidden form—Northern pygmy owl.
Lifespan—4 years.
Tier – 4.

Appearance.

A very small and rotund bird. It appears white with black markings which contrast vastly with its massive, near-fluorescent eyes that are always a range of different colours. Each bird has different eyes from the next and it is not uncommon for these birds to be heterochromatic in eye colour.

Description.

The brain bird is perhaps the best parasite you will ever have. This creature will pick a host who is particularly hopeless in its decision making and will begin infiltrating its mind. First, it will read the host’s thoughts and deduce how they go about making decisions. Next it begins to take those decisions and control the mind of its host into making better decisions. As a result, the host becomes completely dependent on the bird to make every decision for it since it only ever brings the host good fortune. In return, the bird gets protection and an easy way of feeding itself. This forced symbiosis can indeed have its perks, but it is also risky business for both the bird and its host. The host may die if the bird spontaneously decides to leave or the host may be too strong willed to be controlled by the bird. In a worst case scenario, a host may out-smart the bird by tricking it into thinking that it has control, then suddenly turn and eat the bird itself. Sometimes the brain bird doesn’t know what is best for itself even if it knows what is best for you.

There are many wild stories about this tiny yet troublesome bird. Some people have kick-started their careers with its help, others have had a brief four years of good fortune only to lose everything once their bird dies. One man bought multiple brain birds from the black market to push his luck to its limit, only to find that the birds kept trying to override each other and eventually started sabotaging each other’s efforts, resulting in the man’s eventual death when he tripped over a black cat and fell down a manhole. The cat was not hurt.

On encountering.

Try not to meet its gaze as that is how it can access your thoughts. It is also best not to strike up a conversation with the bird since it may try to convince you into letting out more information than you should. I would recommend dull small talk since such a smart bird doesn’t appreciate such mindless conversation. However if you really feel like your luck is all but run out, maybe it would be worth letting it fix your life, only if things really can’t get any worse for you.  

A bird in the bush is best left in its place, its stare’s worth a rise and fall from grace.

I have also set out some thumbnail concepts for other illustrations that will be featured in the book to give a better idea of how the book will look.





 

 

 

 

 

 

Chidderin and critiques

Firstly, the third illustration for my book is complete.

This is the first time that I have used photobashing to speed up the process with these illustrations (using my own photos).

Secondly I have started receiving critiques on other illustrations that I have posted online, meaning that I can start making changes to them according to said critiques in order to improve my work.

Begining the book.

All of the writing for the book prototype is now complete, coming to a staggering wordcount of over 15,000 words which is the equivalent to a dissertation. I have also made a start to the illustrations.

My main concern for this book is that it won't be properly finished before the deadline. Ideally I would have liked to have it fully illustrated and fully written, though I feel I should set a bare minimum of at least one Zbrush model if I find that I cannot meet the deadline. If it is just a prototype, it doesn't even need to be printed off, it can be saved as a PDF and blank pages can be inserted where the missing creature designs need to go. I may also apply for an extension.

First Blog Evaluation.

This is a short blog post to sum up what I have learnt over the past several weeks for the first three learning outcomes. I will be reflecting on the work I have done and using it to understand what direction my work will be taking after this point.

What I have learnt.

Firstly I have learnt a great deal about basic character design principles and some of the terminology used to describe different aspect of character design, (eg, presence, gesture, shape language etc...). I have come to understand how important it is to create a striking character design that immediately appeals to someone viewing it and how not to make a character feel unappealing and generic.

I have also learnt the many differences between character design and creature design and where these overlap. There are a lot more principles to take into account for designing a character than just a creature, but all principles of creature design can also apply to your character.

I have learnt a great deal about anatomy, though perhaps not enough as I will elaborate on shortly. I at least have a fundamental and basic understanding of skeletons and the muscular system in humans and animals as well as many adaptations of vertebrates and invertebrates. I can create a skeletal and muscular system for a fantasy creature without too much difficulty.

Lastly, I have learnt a great deal more about ZBrush and how I can use it to speed up my workflow. Dynamesh is a very fast and powerful tool and I have been using it a lot. I now also understand Zbrush's strengths and limitations. On top of this, I now understand how to blend the elements of Zbrush and Photoshop to create a high-quality end product.

What was valuable.

It is very difficult to say exactly what was valuable without resorting to "everything I have learnt so far is valuable". But to be more precise, the most valuable lessons have come from what I learnt in "Zbrush Creature Design: Creating Dynamic Concept Imagery for Film and Games". Many of the other books I took out were good to give me inspiration or to fill the gaps in my knowledge, but this book alone gave me a fast and concise lesson for every single one of the first three learning outcomes, especially on the Zbrush side of things.

That's not to say that every other book, video and audio piece relating to character design didn't help, because they did. However, some were a little on the time-wasting side and others just summed up what I already knew.

What was not valuable.

I don't want to say that nothing was valuable, but perhaps there were times that I didn't need to do as much work as I did. This includes when I decided to draw all of the horse breeds just to try and hammer horse anatomy into my head or when I went through the Loomis books and drew the same figure three times over. I did learn from these, but perhaps more than I needed to which ended up tiring me out and making it harder for me to learn more as a result. A few of the books weren't really worth reading fully, either. These include "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" which didn't contain illustrations of creature designs.

What problems I have encountered.

Other than minor bugs with Zbrush and the occasional bout of burnout, my biggest issue has to be time. This pertains to both managing time in that I have not been very efficient in maximising my study time and that I feel that there simply hasn't been enough time to learn everything I need. A lot of artists say that you never stop learning, which is true, but that's never an excuse for having extremely weak fundamentals. I am talking mostly about anatomy. This is somewhat a catch 22 situation. I spent a previous paragraph complaining that I spent too much time agonising over anatomy, but I still feel like my sense of anatomy isn't strong enough to be "industry standard". If someone points to a muscle, I probably wouldn't be able to remember the name of it. I certainly couldn't draw an anatomically correct human figure from memory, either. Perhaps it is that the time spent doing the negotiated skills module wasn't enough to fully learn and understand anatomy. It is better than it was a few weeks ago, but perhaps only marginally.

How has the learning informed the final learning outcome.

The knowledge gained from the first three learning outcomes has helped me understand just how much work I need to put into the final book in order to complete it. It has helped me pull together my ideas and solidify my character designs so that hopefully, the final product will be of a very high quality. It has also helped me understand that I shouldn't overwork myself and my ideas.

Wrapping up the first 3 learning outcomes.

Now is the final stretch for this project. I have done as much as I can on the side of planning and character design and I feel like there isn’t much more for me to do now considering that the deadline for learning outcomes 1, 2 and 3 are coming up. I am using this blog post to bring together my final creature ideas and sum up what needs to be done for the final learning outcome.

As mentioned before, I am including 25 species plus an extra one for a dishonourable mention. The majority of creatures are creatures that I have already created and fussed out the designs for over the years. These include; Lunarphrax, Auroraphrax, cervichaun, moonstalker, Peruvian thundersnatch, angel spider, vykurian nightshriek, jeckersnapper, stigs and glaistigs, solarphrax,  chidderin, fenree, whistling unicorn, seaboys, mollasserphrax and blood dragon. There isn’t a lot that needs doing to these creatures other than perhaps a quick brush-up in their anatomy and overall designs. Therefore, I’m not posting any re-designs of them here.

Next are the creatures that have already been created, though need significant redesigns or more added to their species. These include; Gatekeeper serpent, sea fury, gut-guzzling-gut-ripper and vampire. I have included some updated ideas for these below.

 

 

 

 

Lastly are creatures that I haven’t drawn before that need designing. These are; Sonicaphrax, audiaphrax, vorkuu, falkerdeer, brain bird and deadly pathway. I have posted designs for these below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After I have done my evaluation blog post to sum up what I have learnt, I will be moving on to the final book itself and bringing a close to the first three learning outcomes. After that, I will be just planning the drawings and pages for the book, plus what will be written.

ArtPrompts and misc.

 

I recently found out about a website called "ArtPrompts" which gives prompts to artists who have artist block. Some character designers like Jake Parker use the website and I thought it would be good for me to try it out as well. Here is a link to the website.

 

http://artprompts.org/

 

Below are three character designs I did from the website.

 

First is a fisherman in a peaceful place.

 

 

The next is a cheesy sci-fi villain

 

 

And lastly, non-typical beauty

 

 

I feel that ArtPrompts is a useful website for trying to think of new and interesting character designs on the spot. I may use it if I find myself struggling to get new ideas.

 

Lastly are two more drawings I did. One is a music scientist who wears a boombox on his head and the next is some kind of professor examining a dragon specimen.

 

 

 

Misc. Studies 2

 I've recently been doing a few studies to help me think about my work. Now that I have narrowed down my scope, I have come up with the first concept for one of the creatures I wanted to include, the falkerdeer.

 

 

Attempted to draw a figure from memory. 

 

Goblin concept.

 



 

Misc. sketchbook junk.

 

 

 

 

Below is a Zbrush "sketch" which didn't take me long to do. I did this before I did the hobbler troll to get me used to using Zbrush again.

 

 

 

A picture of Rio done for a mother's day present.  

 

 

Another attempt to do anatomy from memory.

 

 

And finally one of the species from GG - the honey dragon - done in the style of the "Gravity Falls" cartoon as colour practise.

 

 

FINAL final book idea

After completing the Hobbler Troll sculpture recently, I have decided to change the idea for my book. It will now be “Gretchen Goosander’s Top 25 Specimens of The Hidden World”. The reason as to why I wanted to change this is because I feel that 50 species is far too many. I do not want to include every single species I have thought of for the sake of completionism. This will result in having too many species and therefore too much to draw for the book. I would rather pick quality over quantity.

This book will no longer be just a fictional encyclopaedia. I have realised that there are too many magical species in the Gretchen Goosander series to include them all and even when I narrow the scope down to species included in just Upshire, it is still too many to handle. Doing it as a top 25 list can still give the book an encyclopaedia quality, but without it being too heavy. This is intended to be a sort-of gateway book to entice people of the Gretchen Goosander universe into the idea of hidden ones and the world they live in rather than being a proper encyclopaedia. It will also be more original than just going for a straight-up encyclopaedia since this has been done to death by many fantasy writers.

I have written a list of 25 hidden creatures which I would like to include, plus one dishonourable mention (the blood dragon). I can now have 5 of these as Zbrush models instead of 3-4.

Zbrush project - Hobbler troll

 

After studying “Anatomy for 3D Artists: The Essential Guide for CG Professionals” and “ZBrush Creature Design: Creating Dynamic Concept Imagery for Film and Games”, I wanted to try out making my first 3D model of a creature. The creature in question is a hobbler troll.

 

Unlike many of the Gretchen Goosander creatures, I have never drawn an initial concept for a hobbler troll before. This is because hobbler trolls do not appear often in the story book and only appear as minor characters. The most I have thought of for the hobbler troll is the following description;

“If you can imagine a humanoid pug with skin like rotting bark, that’s a hobbler troll in a nutshell.”

But I want to be more experimental with this concept outside of just “humanoid pug”. I want to demonstrate the workflow of coming up with a creature concept for zbrush as well as see just how much human and creature anatomy I have managed to remember. This workflow will be similar to what I did with the unicorn girl, only this time I will be using zbrush mostly.

To begin with, I design the creature using thumbnails and sketches. This is recommended in the Zbrush creature design book which gives a number of ways to go about doing this, but I go with old-fashioned pencil and paper since this is quicker for me. Meanwhile, I play music that fits the character (as suggested by the Zbrush book) and I also look at a good number of pug and rotting bark references. Before going into this, I had already gone through numerous books that have helped inspire the design. These are;

·       Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastic World around You.

·       The Natural History book.

·       Animals Real and Imagined

·       Faeries

·       The Goblins of Labyrinth.

These books have been created by experienced creature designers, biologists and illustrators such as Tony Diterlizzi, Brian Froud and Terryl Whitlatch and I have learnt a lot about character appeal and design from them. Meanwhile, I am always keeping in mind the character’s gesture, weight-distribution, form, presence, personality and appeal. The anatomy is important for grounding, but all of these other character design principles are probably more urgent and need to be tackled first.

I went through a lot of initial designs for the hobbler troll. The third picture down was the image I ended up liking the most as it was simple and effective, though I still explored other design ideas from there until I couldn't think of any more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I did the final design in Photoshop and started playing around with colour schemes. I quite like a lot of these, though some are a little bland while others don't really fit the idea I had in mind. The third, 10th and 11th troll designs are the ones I prefer, though I could only go with one for the final design which ended up being the 11th.

 

 

Here are some progression screenshots.

 

 

 

 

 

And this is the final design! I closely followed instructions from the Zbrush creature design book to achieve this and I am happy with the final result.