Sam Santala - Concept Artist | Illustrator

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...

I've recently been doing a self directed course from Conceptart.org. One of the tasks was to spend 3 hours trying to paint a self portrait so you could observe all the light effectively. I'm happy with how the portrait came out, but recently a hashtag on Twitter called '#anyonecanimproveatdrawing' has been floating about, and it reminded me of a portrait I had painted of myself a few years back. I thought it might be interesting to show the improvement so here you go:

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...

I knew environment design was one of my weaker areas. And so I signed up for Nathan Fowkes Environment Design class. His lesson threw you in the deep end of work pretty fast, which I actually really enjoyed. And so this post is just about the first lesson of the class. To take 10-12 images we like, and study and replicate them, within a short period of time. Luckily I have a very large collection of images on my ( Pinterest board , and so finding some images I liked proved quite easy. And so here are the 12 images I made for this assignment: These were actually really fun, and I'm hoping to do more soon!