Sam Santala - Concept Artist | Illustrator

I decided it had been a while since I created a ' Monster Hunter ' creature, and an accompanying armour set. And with Monster Hunter: Worlds recent release and success, I figured now would be a good time to begin work on a creature design I had had in my head for a while. (For this blog post I will be focusing entirely on the Donkestra creature design. If you'd like to see how the armour was made you can find the joint blog post here: Donkestra Armour Blog ) So before we begin, let's start at the end. Here is the final design: The Donkestra is a gliding reptile with heavy influences from mammals and birds. It uses skin flaps to glide across the land, whilst its spines and reinforced skull help defend it from predators and hunt down prey. Its hooked tail allows it to both hang upside down as it rests, and to quickly adjust its course mid-flight But originally I had not inteded the creature to work in this manner at all. I had begun work on this thinking

I decided to spend some of my spare time the last few weeks doing some armour studies. This had initially started as just a bit of practice on the side, but after some really positive feedback and some requests for a tutorial I ended up making an entire collection of texture spheres and cleaned up a lot of the studies so people could better understand how to paint these types of things too. Firstly we have the finished studies themselves. I had tried gathering a few different types of armour specifically to understand both their design, and their material properties, so we have things from clean plate mail to tanned leather and rusted metal. These took some time on their own, but I then decided to create material spheres for as select few textures. For those of you who haven't come across material spheres before, they are used as a way of studying and showing how light works on various types of textures, it gives you all the variables of having a strong focal li

Hey everyone, I just wanted to let you all know that my work is going to be featured inside Spectrum 24 ! If you're unsure what Spectrum is, it's a yearly collection of art created by the best concept artists, illustrators and painters in the industry, with this year being their 24th edition. Being featured in publications like this is the kind of thing I've been dreaming of since I first started painting, and I'm genuinely so humbled to have my work selected to go alongside the truly fantastic artists that go into Spectrum. This feels like some of the most encouraging news I've had in a long time and it's totally made my day. And I hope you all take a look at some of the fine work the other artists who've been selected produce, I would argue they are objectively amazing. Spectrum 24 Entries Love, -Sam

Big post this time! So this is the last few weeks of the Schoolism course combined into one. Our first task was to study elephants, both Indian and African, so we could learn the subtle differences in their anatomy (there's more thasn just their ears you know :P) Here's what I created with the appropriate notes: It was really interesting to do, as I certainly underestimated the number of anatomical differences myself before starting this. Next we had to take another animal and combine it with any of the previous studies thus far. I chose to take these elephants, and combine them with a Moose. Creating a Mooslephant ! And finally we had to create an illustration using this creature. I chose to try and tell the story of characters from Magic: the gathering. Specifically a group of Kor as they tried to tame this wild beast. If you've seen my development process before you should be familiar with the steps I've taken to make this illustration: In