Sketchbook: Halloween Monster

This week's theme was a halloween monster. Needless to say, I had a lot of fun with this one. I drew inspiration from my favourite monster games, paying particular attention to Darksiders. Darksiders has incredible monster design and art style, so this was my starting point and featured heavily on my mood board.

I used this to influence my designs and sketched out some pretty grotesque fat monsters. I also did a bit of research on 'what humans find creepy' and 'why things are creepy' and found that a lot of creepiness comes from ambiguity. For instance, masks which show no emotion or prevent us from understanding what the person is feeling, they're creepy. So with this in mind, I also sketched out some creatures in masks. One featured a gas mask which I quite liked but the overall design wasn't creepy or monstrous enough for my taste. I eventually settled on this design. I got to keep the hulking grotesque figure, as well as carry forward a bit of the emotionless face work I did, and hey, I threw in a huge mouth belly, because why not, it's Halloween!

I went through my familiar process on Photoshop of scanning in the lineart, adding in block colour, adding shadow values and then finalising with some extra detail. With this one though, I wanted it to look a little less shiny and a little more gritty and rough, so rather than over painting, I decided to go back to the lineart layer and add detail through there. The extra lines makes the creature look a bit more rough and frantic, rather than a neat and precise finish like my tentacle creature.

This is the final design.