FiddzyDesign – Concept Artwork

At the end of January I uploaded a piece called “Cave of the Opinnanite”, that featured a clan of large sentient purple gastropods I named the Opinnanite, living in their subterranean home. Painted as an experimental colour piece to help improve my digital rendering skills, I was never truly happy with its final outcome, especially when it came to the creatures themselves, always knowing I could of pushed their design further. So eventually I finally decided it was time for a redesign, resulting in the Opinnanite version 2.0 …

War Opinnanite

For the redesign I focused more on its form and structure, trying to create a more believable creature, with more life and character. The biggest change was the face, this time giving it a more humanoid appearance, rather than the originals dim-witted, blobfish inspired face. I also wanted to push its gastropod biology, giving it an even more fluid appearance, almost as if it was made from sludge. Finally the World War II helmet and grenade where more of an aesthetic fun touch, used to help show the creature as a sentient character, rather than a slimy purple biomass.

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The two creature designs below came from the work produced for this weeks conceptart.org Creature of the Week (C.O.W) contest, C.O.W #169 Beautiful Rebirth. The aim of this contest was to pick a monster from fiction that has or might off scared you, then redesign it as a cute and beautiful creature. For my entry I picked the Critter aliens from the Critter film series, a race of hairy, toothed and ugly murderous alien rodents.

Beautiful Rebirth – My Pet Critter

This first image was my entry into the C.O.W Beautiful Rebirth contest. Taking the Critter alien and merging it with hamster like qualities to give it a cuter more innocent appearance, then imagining what it would be like to take it and give it a makeover, with pink candy floss like hair giving it embedded beauty while still keeping the essence of the creatures unpleasant nature.

Krytammer

This second image was a redesigned version of my C.O.W entry, used to create my own horrid alien rodent, the garbage eating Krytammer.

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These two creature designs were created as an extension to alien shark designs done previously, only this time I had gained my initial inspiration from the utterly bizarre looking Australian deep-sea fish, the Blobfish, particularly the Blob Sculpin species. Although unlike the shark designs which focused primarily on linework, these alien influenced blobfish where drawn specifically looking at developing my colour application, using a more defined brush to help show greater contrast and form.

The Blobmander

The colour application on the Blobmander is similar to how I normally work, however here I have tried to use less blurring to gain sharper lines  on my colours creating greater contrast, especially in the highlights. The creature itself is a cross between the blob sculpin and a Chinese giant Salamander.

Cave of the Opinnanite

This piece showing the primitive cave dwelling Opinnanite was done as a purely digital creation, unlike the Blobmander above. This allowed me to concentrate on building form with colour rather than with linework. Overall while not perfect I felt it was a good step forward in the right direction, with this design also allowing to be play with depth of field, here using a series of 2D layers in a similar fashion as to how I use to build depth in Flash animation. While not designed to be an aquatic species the facial structure of the Opinnanite was based on the illusive blobfish.

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Zear Tark Roost on Tearah Torah

The landscape above was inspired by the sentient bird creatures I had recently finished designing, the Zears. After drawing the Zears I started to think about how they might live and what their homeworld might look like. My idea was that they would live in large communal nests, similar to a bee hive or dove cote, built from the ground up with mud and sticks like a house martians nest cup. This giant mud structure would then be used as a towering vertical city, which would dominate the surrounding savanna landscape.

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Zear Zip (Left) & Zear Tark (Right)

Although I will admit that its not one of my best or personal favorite drawings, what I do like about it is its use of colour. The idea behind the piece was to design two different yet closely related sentient species, here shown in the form of the Zear Zip and Zear Tark, two not very sentient looking bird species, hence the necklace.

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These two characters where designed to have a more fantasy, Elf like sense about them. Rather than being more science fiction and alien focused.

Elcomoo Path WatcherYam’Flitt Path Watcher

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