Creature Design Workshop at Animex

Designing Creatures

Last week I attended the 'Drawing for creature design: theory and practice' workshop at the Animex festival at Teesside University. Taken by Rosemary Chalmers, a concept artist and games lecturer at the University, it was a fun, informative and inspiring morning using the impressive computing facilities to learn the concepts behind designing our own creatures.

The reason I was excited to attend is to help me begin to create imagery for my illustrations of the folk and fairy tales of North Yorkshire. Many of the creatures that are described in these tales require a fair bit of imagination and sometimes I struggle to communicate what's in my head onto the paper! I'm also in total awe of concept artists, their drawing skills are amazing and it's wonderful to see the products of their imaginations, so the chance to be tutored by a concept artist for this workshop was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Rosemary began by explaining her background and specialism in creature design and showing us some of the work from her portfolio. She then demonstrated a method of building your creature from its habitat upwards, taking into account its particular adaptations and specialisations. I spent a short while researching possible habitats and the animals that live there, and settled on a mountain grassland habitat and bighorn sheep as my starting point. 

Although several attendees worked entirely in traditional media to create their creatures, Rosemary helped us to use the (expensive-looking) Wacom Cintiqs and stylus pens along with layers in Photoshop to sketch out the initial shape and then refine elements of it whilst adding features from other animals. I had decided I wanted my creature to actually be carnivorous - an ambush predator, that could use tools. Looking at animals that have these traits, I added elements and features to my sheep from the spotted hyena, the grey heron, and the tufted capuchin monkey.

I think you'll agree, my final creature looks nothing like each of these animals!

It was so much fun using a Wacom Cintiq. It's like a computer screen that you can draw directly onto using a stylus. It was wonderfully responsive, allowing pressure-sensitivity to sketch soft or hard lines. It made my little cheap Wacom tablet I use at home look almost prehistoric! Of course, you don't need either of those to create creatures. All the techniques Rosemary showed us can be done using traditional media - although it's a little more effort to erase, redraw, rescale or change parts of the image. 

As the workshop came to a close, I didn't want to leave, as I was just starting to add some colour. In the end, I rushed through, without considering whether my creature would have particular markings, or bright colours, or particular textures on its face... so it's ended up a pretty drab capuchin-brown. Sorry, sheep-hyena-heron-monkey!

I'm going to have fun designing the creatures for my folk tales illustrations!