This is gonna be a long-ish one folks, so bear with me as I talk a bit about my history with creatures and maybe four or so of my favourite creature designers.
I think a lot of people probably think of robots when they think about the stuff I draw, but if you look at the breadth of my artistic journey, and the way in which I just kinda kept drawing the same shit until I was good enough at it to do it professionally, creatures are the unbroken streak. From the age of 4 or 5 to the present day, any sketchbook you find of mine will have some weird lizards, or xenomorph rip-offs or chimera of whatever animals I happened to be fascinated with at the time. In university, at the age of 19, I embroiled myself deep into the forums on ConceptArt.org and immediately fell into a creature design hole I would spend the next 4 years crawling out of. The forums featured a competition called "Creature of the Week", a weekly creature design competition that saw people of many skill levels from beginner to professional all working on the same prompt.
I was immediately confronted with 2 facts: 1. I desperately wanted to win this competition and 2. I was absolutely not good enough at drawing to win this competition. My first entry (2009) looked like this:
The winner was Andrew Hou (aka njoo), and his looked like this:
Andrew Hou had been a professional for some years, working with clients like Capcom, teaching at Schoolism, and when I would go through the archive of winners and see that njoo was the second-most decorated winner in the history of the competition I became pretty enamoured with his work. Some of it was really clever.
The second time I entered creature of the week, I was up against several more incredible creature designers, but notably against Brynn Metheney, a creature designer whose work is more influential to how I think about drawing creatures than anyone else's. I have Brynn's work tattooed across my entire upper left arm. Brynn has an unparalleled ability to make believable animal anatomy. Her approach takes into account skeletal and muscular structure, sure, but the thing that makes it sing is that she gives everything weight. Every time I see how she draws feet I want to scream because I have never been able to get close.
Her work captures not just the form and heft of creatures, but also imbues them with personality in a way that most of us can't. Many of us either push too far into human personality for creatures, or else they become slobbering, feral screamers like me looking at this work.
A lot of this is because the best creature designers are people who love looking at animals, and have been drawing them all their lives, and it's impossible to talk about creature designers without looking at one of Brynn's biggest influences, Terryl Whitlatch, who you have seen a book cover of already, this post.
If you ever watched Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and went: "well the creatures in this are really cool." That's Terryl. She did all of the creature design concept art. Those whacky, giant fish on Naboo? Sebulba? That's her. If you want to look at the way that, for example, the Monster Hunter creature designers are able to break down their stuff to the bones, they are taking cues from Terryl. Really one of the first designers to visually illustrate the way we need to approach fictional creatures like real, physical animals and so educate yourself to understand the biomechanics.
Back on the ConceptArt.org forums in 2010 I had been participating nearly every week, and was seeing some improvement. I was, after a year, given the competition to moderate along with another artist, Clark Miller. ConceptArt.org was already in decline in 2013 when I handed off my mod duties to Rob Powell and CG Hub was just about to collapse with a startling immediacy. I got my creature design fix by looking, daily, at the now-defunct CreatureSpot.com and there I found another pillar of my creature design influence: Allison Theus.
If Brynn's work I love for being grounded, weighty and subtle, Allison's I love for almost the opposite. It's ornate, it's dynamically posed like its about to explode, and often there are anatomical touches so wild I never would have considered them.
By the end of my time running Creature of the Week, I'd had 2 (or 3?) wins. It was steady improvement. This design was what took the final victory I had, in 2014, The Trident.
My approach since 2014 has shifted a lot and there are other creature designers that are super influential to me, but I'm going to leave it with these 4, for now and maybe talk about some others in another post. Obviously I can't just ignore stuff like how H.R. Giger made something so cool that I was obsessed with it even before I was allowed to watch the movie, so I'll leave you on some drawings from when I was aged 9 or 10 or so, where you can see the difference that 15 years of experience makes.
