Character Art

CREATE YOUR OWN DARK CREATURES~ with video speed-painting

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tokyolondon

A. Introducing

Hi, welcome to another tutorials, it’ve been a months, how do you do lately?

So, i think we’re all have seen a creature from the darkness once in our life, maybe it’s in the movies we’ve watch, the story that we’ve been told, or, just in our imagination.

But, as an artist, how do we bring them out of or mind, to make them appear lively, and scared people with them?

I tried to create some, based on my imagination, my experience and i want to share some easy ways that i did when creating characters.

So, let’s get started!

B. The Mind-map

To make things clear and easy for you to imagination, I will share my mind-map here. When I have to create something that I don’t familiar to it, I will write it down in the mind-map like this, so I can focus to what I have to do to bring out the characteristics of it.

You can try it too!

So, in this tutorial, I will tell you clearer in all the part below. You can watch my time-lapse video, I’ll put the link after the tutorial.

C. The Influences

The dark creatures can be found easily in the myths, the legend, fairy tale stories or movies. In each different traditional cultures, there are different kind of dark creatures that appeared as the embodiment of the evil, the darkness, the tragedy, etc.

You can easily find the references of them by researching the documents of your own country traditional culture or in other’s cultures that you are interested in.

D. The Artwork Atmosphere

Like I’ve write in the mindmap, the atmosphere in these pictures will be:

🖤dark ,

🖤 horror,

🖤 mysterious.

It’s like a black space in your imagination that scared you and the others, too. I will give you some examples of color palette in the upcoming part.

I used these color palette to paint the backgrounds color first so when I paint the characters, their color will not too different from the main color tone.

E. Creating Characters

In this part, I will tell you more details about how to create one.

First, in the theme of ugliness, horror, strangeness, malformation and mutation, we will start with a kind crossing with another kind.

For example, you can cross-over more than 1 species’ characteristics into one character. Like 2 different animals, or animal - human, animal - plant or plant - human.

For this example, this one is a siren, her voice can enchanted the human who get into her place and then eat their heart out.

So the idea is a woman who have half of her body is human and the other is a fish tail. Her mouth is widely open on her bony face. Her ear is fish gill and she has a horn on the forehead. She is skinny, and her hand turned to claws to easy take your heart out of your chest.

This one is a spider monster. She has a human-like face but more eyes, and the teeth is sharp and grow out of her mouth. Her body is the spider body. As the spider has 8 legs, she have 2 more arms and legs too. The more colorful the spider is, the more dangerous it has. So I decide to add more details on the body. Here’s I give here more and more eyes on her body.

These one is different. But this is another way to design a unlikely, strange creatures. It’s too adding more body-part to it.

I grown up with the story of my old grandma about a creature that will bring me away if I am not a good child. He has 3 heads, 6 arms and 12 eyes. This used to scare the crap out of me every single time I’ve heard it. But now I think it’s quite exciting to use it like a reference to draw.

You also can do it to an animal too. This Black cat has one more tail and 4 more eyes on his back.

You can also cross a plant to an animal. Here is a carnivorous plants which has tentacles and a long long tongue and many tiny sharp teeth.

This one is a demon. You can see I draw him skinny and bony, with the unlikely long legs, and the ribs without the skin cover it.

F. More TIPS

To conclusion about creating the dark creatures, here is some ways to transforming a normal character to the dark creatures:

🖤 Crossing more than 1 species’ characteristics to one character: animal-animal, animal-human, human-plant, animal-plant, etc. make it malformation and mutation, scary, unreal and mysterious.

🖤 Increase in size of a part of the body, make it looks strangely mutation: longer neck, arms, legs, horn(s), claws, tail(s).

🖤 Add or remove body part: eyes, arms, legs, heads, etc.

🖤 Adding these details to your character body: bony body type, threadbare, scratches, scars, etc.

🖤 Adding Dripping liquid: that can be blood, sweat, body fluids, water, lava, etc.

🖤 Adding Shining, Glow part on the dark skin color

🖤 Adding smog, skulls, bones, blood, flying torn fabric, etc. to the background.

For example, i have:

I. Bonus: Drawing Assets and Color Palette

Here is the color palette and some drawing assets that I used to paint these character. I want to say thank you so much to the creators of these, they did an excellent work with those assets!

The Assets: