Previous monsters lead to new inspirations

Before I really started drawing any new monsters I thought it best to first look back at what I had already done. Above are some of the monsters that came out of second year projects, a variety of styles, colours and shapes. A lot were quite bright in colour and most of them had a large gaping mouth bearing some rather unruly teeth. If anything I saw my dissertation as a chance to enhance my character design skills and push myself further.

Above is a mood board showing my sketchbook from summer last year. the character on the bottom left hand corner made it into a coloured version which can be seen in the first image top left.
A few of these monster sketches were made whilst I was on my internship at Hallmark, surprisingly they had briefed me to design monster cards for children so it made sense to keep a monster sketch journal.

These sketches again are from the same book but at this point I was deep into the summer break and was starting to experiment with new monsters and forms. After doing a lot of monster research I concluded that I wanted to design something that would show how monsters have evolved through time so at this point I was trying to decide how I was going to do that.

I remembered that I wanted to cover some of the monster cult classics such as Dracula and Frankenstein so I had started to draw my interpretations of these classics.

And here are some mummy drawings that I worked on, I even managed to get a digital render of the mummy (center image) finished before my first proper tutorial with Mel which was in September.

I had a busy summer of researching and drawing, I was trying to find myself as an Illustrator and felt like the dissertation was pushing me to explore new ideas. I still had two months or so before I was even due back so I returned back to the drawing board and came out with some more stylized monster designs as I wasn't sure on the cult classics idea any more.

And here are of the images that made the cut, I took some designs and rendered them digitally and there are also some new additions that were the result of digital drawing and experimentation. I had already seen a change in my style over the summer and these guys really helped me find my way. Things were starting to look polished and more professional.

Finally I just wanted to post some outcomes that came from the first module of my third year as they were probably some of the best monster designs I had ever done. It was really nice to see the evolution of my characters from second year leading into the third, I knew my artefact would have to be even better and it would have to push me further than before.