Bile toad and soldier bug

Once again I've produced monsters with no variants. Oh I'm history's greatest monster.


Both of these are old line work tarted up a little. I've been going through old WiP sketch pages and trying to rescue abandoned bits with potential. It's nifty that there's a decent stock to be plundered there. It makes me happy that I'm actually producing this volume of stuff. There's some saying about how it's impossible to do the same thing three-hundred times and not get better at it. It's cool to go back to failures now I'm better less crap.

The amphibious thing is a bile toad. I know it's not a toad, but I like the name. I don't think it's diseased - the "bile" is natural toxin that's expelled through the skin and drool. I am very pleased with the milky eyes. I wonder whether I could do a worthy variant with exactly the same linework, but losing the warts.

The soldier bug was briefly a bug soldier. But bug soldier sounds like a description, while a soldier bug is a name. I used the detail here to add depth and definition to shapes, sticking my middle finger up at a consistent light source. Also to make the pointy bits look sharp. Colours suffered some twiddling when I realised that the pale face and colourful horns/carapace made him look like a clown. I couldn't unsee it. I can live with the current incarnation.

Taps

Gribblies. I suppose these would go along with big burly beetle guy, but I have no specific plan. These were drawn for fun. There's a common theme of four eyes - I couldn't help coming up with some unifying features, but other than that they're not really terribly similar. I guess the maggot could be a larva, the skinny guy and the burly beetle could be different castes, but the rockworm is blatantly a different species altogether.

Maybe they'll end up being wandering monsters or something equally random. They were fun to do and that's all that really matters. I can come up with a theme after the fact if I end up doing enough of them.

I tried being a little more adventurous with the colour here. Lanky and worm have highlights in their eyes (maggot's eyes were too small to bother with) and worm has a two-tone body. Even maggot has an unusually smooth colour variation across his body. I like it. I might try more deviations from flat shading in the future.

Lanky was hard to colour. The angular body shape and odd pose meant it was hard to parse what you were looking at. Eventually I just coloured the chest+arms a different, stronger colour than the legs and trunk. The hands and hooves were used as details to unify the two schemes across the body. I think it just about works.

Worm caused me to doubt myself. That chunky hide is really detailed. I think two of the chunks are pentagons, and all the rest are either deformed triangles or quads, but even so it gives the impression of a lot of fiddly detail. And even if the total line count isn't that high compared to some of the others I've done, it has a more naturally detailed appearance that I worried would make it stick out. Still not totally convinced that it doesn't, even if the main body is just three S-curves. The beak too is a little more detailed than I'd like, but the hide steals the show. Monsters in general need more lines. I'll let it go for now.

Big burly bastards

Monsters are tricky. I can't really do much stickman stuff with them, because the eye isn't so good at knowing what it's looking at. Large and burly is also incompatible with stickman. So, large and burly monsters are doubly bothersome. On the plus side, if stickmen are the standard, then limbs with actual shape and volume look especially large and burly.

So, two large burly monsters. A giant insect guy, and an elder brine mutant. See, I told you I was planning more brine mutants. it just took a few months before I came up with a fish-guy sketch that wasn't awful.

Insect guy's anatomy is more man-in-suit than beetle, although he does have that carapace. I do tend to repeat the same styles and designs with anything that has large armour segments. Still, I'm not unhappy with him. Is he the start of a batch of big mutant arthropods? Possibly.

His head was tricky. On the sketch that area was just a big scribble. Once I settled on a beetlish tiny head, I had the problem of how to make it stand out against the chest. Colour to the rescue. The secondary arms gave me pause too - they're small enough that I didn't want to devote too many lines to them, but I wanted them to look like more than armour ornamentation. Colour helps here too. I imagine the ltitle arms are used for feeding himself, grooming and other delicate work - the big strong arms probably aren't so dexterous.

Fish guy's feet are a bit dodgy. I cut myself some slack since they're meant to be froggy/fishy - webbed and floppy. The hand on the ground just about works, but I'm trying not to look too hard at it.

Variants on these two guys' skeletons seem unlikely. First of all, being large burly monsters there's not really much of an underlying skeleton. No clothes or accessories means not much to vary. I'd have to end up redrawing quite a bit of them, in which case I may as well just do a whole new one.

Perhaps for cases like these and the dinosaurs, I should use colour variations only. It could work but I'm not terribly enthusiastic. I was thinking they could be unique "boss" monsters, but I can't do that for every monster that's tricky to tweak. But palette swaps are so cheap...