Sam Santala - Concept Artist | Illustrator

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...

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...

ConceptArt.org's forums often hold a Creature of the Week contest. Many of my older posts from a few years ago were typically revolved around these contests and I can certainly see how much I've developed from my posts back in 2012... It's been a couple years since I last entered though, and with the latest contest sounding as fun as it did I couldn't resist trying to see what I came up with. Final Design This weeks topic was to redesign the Elder Dragon 'Bahamut' from the Final Fantasy series. Bahamut is typically shown as an almost anthropomorphized dragon, with an upright body and large wings. However, I wanted to try spending this time designing a more feral creature. I started by trying to draw some very strange dragon shapes, adjusting proportions and wing spans. I had an image of a lumbering creature with huge wings and small arms originally. Eventually I settled on the more typical draconian design, trying to keep the wings the main focus...