Topic Three: Rhinoceros - (Creature/Other) Assignment #1

Topic Three: Rhinoceros - (Creature/Other) Assignment #1

This was definitely my favorite assignment out of them all so far! Ironically, this ended up with me having literally no progress shots (I got so excited and threw myself into the designs that I...kinda forgot about everything else. Ugh). So I'll just have to contend with explaining my thoughts as I went through the motions.

I'll prelude this with saying, as you probably already knew, I have prior knowledge in relation to animals and identifying them. As a result, for the 'Creature' side of things, I realized quickly that the first was a hippo. So I decided pretty quick not to do that one, as whatever I created would be pretty heavily influenced by that, and I wanted to play around with designing a creature more. So I turned to the second; which I already half-figured was probably some kind of sea slug (small, no face, feelers that look like ears, and emits a stain in water to protect itself? At the least it had to be aquatic). Maybe even a 'sea bunny'. But the more vague description, and knowing the variety in which sea slugs come in, appealed to me much more and gave me more leg room. 

I kept as close to the description as I could while interpreting it my own way, and came up with the little guy above. I was pretty pleased with the design! (Enough that I sketched him up a few more times, but that was probably my inner illustrator peaking through) Obviously, barring the fact they're both mollusks, the original shown below and my creation ended up fairly different. For one, their feelers (which are differently shaped) point in different directions. I also interpreted the membrane and branchiae (gills) differently, the latter as more like fish gills, and the former as attached to the feelers so they could more directly 'cause a current of water to flow' over them. 

As for the 'Other', the choice was fairly clear from the get go. I don't really like drawing people (especially realistically. Horror of horrors.) so of course I was gonna go with another animal-like description. This one reminded me komodo dragons, though they lack the crest that the description had, so perhaps iguanas? I got to work and had a fairly enjoyable time designing this one (I don't often draw reptiles, but I would still rather that than people.). I took inspiration from both komodo dragons and vipers, including the colors. Since the description kept saying they 'must be poisonous' because of their colors, I went with colors we've all learned to associate with a certain poisonous (and one innocent) snake; black, red, and yellow. It's well known that brightly colored animals are often poisonous (or bluffing it to protect themselves), and so I decided to use that since the description never tells us what color the animals are, just that they have various colors. I wish I'd gotten a bit more colored scales onto the body, but at the same time I wanted them to look scattered to reinforce this idea of a 'various colored' animal. There wasn't an actual picture for the real life versions of these animals, but if they were alligators as the illustrations seemed to show, I didn't get it down quite accurately. But I enjoyed the process nonetheless!