Terryl Whitlatch Creature Course #1

I recently signed up to a creature design course hosted by Terryl Whitlatch on Schoolism. I'm a huge fan of Terryl's work, so it'll be interesting to see how I develop my creature work whilst on her course.

These should be weekly updates, and this week's topic was to try and get a grasp of the fundamentals of creature design. So our challenge was to draw a human, a tetrapod, and a human/animal hybrid. Then break those down by rig, skeleton and musculature and label each.

Here's what I came up with:

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Creating the Donkestra Armour

How do you create armour from a fictional Monster whilst retaining its identity? ( NOTE: This is a sister post to creating the Monster Hunter fan creature: 'The Donkestra'. Donkestra Blog Post ) This was the main question I had had in my mind throughout the entire process of creating the Donkestras Armour. So first I will show you what I ended up with, and how I came to this result: These armours are what I felt came to feel, both individual against the collection of armours Monster Hunter sports, and individual to the base Monster, the Donkestra (seen below) . So to begin with, I have to identify what elements of this creature are particularly iconic to it. What makes this armour recognizable as identifiable as Donkestra hide. and I came up with this: The Donkestras most discernable traits were its large round head, its bright feathers, and its pale skin flaps. With its secondary traits being the dark spines that covered its body. Knowing these traits, I b

Spanish Conquistador

After doing some fantasy based character design for other IP's I decided I wanted to do something that was more grounded in reality. I chose to do some sort of historical character, and after looking up the history of Spanish Conquistadors I found something I really wanted to work on. See, with Conquistadors a lot of them were just poor spaniards who didn't have a full set of armour, but didn't really need it either. they had been fighting the native South Americans for decades and found that much of a 'full' set of armour was essentially useless, what with the highest technological weapon the natives had being clubs. Metal armour was just too strong for the natives, and too heavy for the invaders. And so I conceived a character that had been fighting for many, many years to conquer these foreign lands, but had just grown tired of it. I didn't want him to have much armour, maybe just a breastplate, and for them to look confident, but perhaps also tired. I b

Creating the Donkestra.

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

Sam Santala - Concept Artist | Illustrator

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