Squamus magi

Tarted up from the first squagus. Though now I look back at him there's some niceness that got lost along the way. The original isn't staring into the camera, which makes the pose look more natural. On the other hand, head-on view gives them a priestly air.

It took a long while to get three compatible variations that I was happy with. I'm still not certain what #2's back fins are, or exactly how #3's tail is coiled but I can live with it. The first one is still my favourite. I completed him, colours and all, before even the linework for the other two.

Number three had to be hue-shifted at the last minute because I'd accidentally coloured him like a dratini (pokemon). This fleshy pink suits him.

There were a few patches of detail that I decided to remove. Mottling on the tentacles and so forth. Id gone too far and it made the few flat areas look bad. Even now #2's borderline overwhelming.

Conceptually these are the priests of the sea cult, devotees of the elder fish god. They don't fight, they just summon and inspire their minions. They might also have creepy fish-god magic such as ink clouds or a hypnotic gaze.

Brine zombies again

I have fixed up my brine zombies. Compared them to the original bunch they have fewer, cleaner lines, tidier colouring and more effective detail. It's reassuring to see that I can now make these kinds of improvements. That I'm better at deciding which details are and are not necessary.

I did wonder whether the torsos of #2 and #3 needed some detail, and I tried to give them some blue waterlogging pattern there, but in the end I think they're better left clean.

A few notable changes I made:
No jackets. Unnecessary extra lines.
Added vertical lines that imply drips or hanging weed.
No variation in trousers and boots. These areas are not interesting or important.
Shrank boots. They were a bit too clompy before. I'm not sure if this is just correcting a mistake in my proportions, or a matter of my style for these characters evolving.

I'm not very happy with the detail layer of the seaweed. I'm not sure what I really want from that texture or how to get it. But I've made such strides everywhere else that I refuse to get bogged down there.

Brine mutant writhers

They need a better name. They're another rescue from an old file. The rightmost guy is the closest to my original idea so it's appropriate that he's the least satisfying of them. The other two look far more "natural", while he's just a tentacle-guy wearing a shell. I'm not sure how I should have done him differently. 

I hit a block working on the tentacles and had to sleep on it before I could finish them off. The colouring wasn't exactly easy, but there was a feeling of continual progress. I wasn't demoralised by speedbumps or having to redo parts. Maybe that means I'm getting the hang of things.

#2's head-shell probably took the most effort for the least impact. No matter what colour I gave it, it stood out too much. In the end I just gave it the same neutral shade as #1's barnacles, and then reused that on #3's crest as well.

#2's arm was originally drawn as a barnacle. When it wasn't coming together I changed it to an anemone, which was a lot more fun to colour. The tentacle's shading is interesting too, with that wobbly gelatinous shape. Looks sting-y.

Parts: Tentacle, torso (including shoulder), head. Thought about adding something to the legs, but I've learned that it's hard to do meaningful distinctions on legs and feet. The shoulders are so detailed that minor things like belts or shoes don't seem worth adding.

Profound ones

This is the third time I've posted these fish-guys here. Last time I had expanded the original one with two variant heads. Now I've varied the bodies and arms too and tidied up a few details. So now they're a proper set. Colours too, of course. Subtle detail: Eel face's bulging belly. Really should have highlighted it with colour, but the scheme didn't allow for it. Maybe if I take (yet) another crack at them in the future. other than that, I'm pleased with these colours. They didn't flow easily, but I like the results. Not that I'm saying they're perfect you understand. But I'm content.

The new standard of detail that I've let myself use lets me do a lot more when there's few line-defined areas of detail and lots of contiguous spaces. I'm sticking with the pointilist patterning, both because it's so easy to do in photoshop and because it works well for sea-creatures. On #1 it makes him look scaly (or possibly shiny, depending on how you look at it), while #2 and 3 have different kinds of mottling.

I'm glad that they're not just three different colour schemes of the same pattern. It also means I can keep the colour schemes close to each other without them seeming samey. I did orignally have more variety - Fishman was a lot lighter, and Shark-man was blue-tinted. They didn't look like they belonged together though so I normalised them. I think that was the right choice - the heads alone are plenty divergent.

The file name is "purebloods" because these are meant to be the members of the sea-cult where the mutations have reached their endpoint, Deep one-style. Nicely encapsulates the cult's attitude to their affliction and all just in a name. And of course it's always nice to apply a sacred-sounding term to something profane.

Going back to the colours, I think I'm going to have to come up with an alternative to the pointilism. It works, but it won't for everything. That'll probably involve pissing about with custom brushes in Photoshop. Ah well; life is full of hardships.

Talent scouts

I thought i was done with the jungle natives but here's another one. These guys like to take and carry around some rather grizzly trophies. If the level of detail allowed, they'd probably be wearing strings of ears. Perhaps these trophy takers are the ones that keep the fetish wards all fresh and scary-looking.

I did a lot of passes on these to get the node count down. Those fur-things on their shoulders were a particular bother. The masks here are pretty simplistic, but I'm ok with that for a bit of variety. I was thinking of monkey island's cannibals when I coloured them, so the one on the left will forever be Lemon-Head to me.

It was difficult to make three different trophy heads. It wasn't long before I gave up and just made two of them skulls - I know skulls aren't meant to have hair, but maybe they're actually dried heads. Besides, skulls look good with scraggly hair. The line coming down from lemon head's trophy is meant to be a string of blood or drool - not sure if that comes across right.

There turned out to be a lot of switchable elements on these guys. Masks, trousers, feet, knife, shoulder and trophy. If I want to keep things under control I'll call the feet and trousers the same element and maybe pair shoulders with masks.

Something else I did recently was come up with some variants for my monster fish-guy. Just head-swaps, but I'm not unhappy with them.

I pondered giving the middle one a dangl- glowy thing - it is meant to be a deep-sea gribbly fish after all - but was happy with its appearance and decided not to overcomplicate things. Shark guy I waffled over; for a while I was wondering whether it looked too much like a monster with a shark-for-a-head rather than a monster with a shark's head.

But yes. Variations. Even if there's no body details I can easily vary without redrawing the whole thing, the head swaps work ok. I'm calling them a success, even if the original is still my favourite.

A hideous, five-beaked maw

The tentacles have been reinforced. Eyestalks, a hideous five-beaked maw and another tentacle style for variety. I think there's a complete elder squid god here.

Individual tentacles summoned by the sea-cult are fine to start, but later on you can encounter multiple tentacles with an eyestalk, and eventually the vile feeding tube. The makings of a nice set of escalating boss encounters. I think I've got just enough material for two sea-cult themed missions; one based around the mundane weirdness of the cult and the other more about the mutants and awakened elder squid god.

Nice bit of continuity to come back to an old area for new encounters. I might also press-gang the old fishers into the sea cult. I'm moving away from the idea of dedicated recruitable characters a little, and in this specific case I think they'd be useful for another set of mundane sea-culters along with the dock thugs and acolytes.

I felt vain so I did a quick marquee select+fill job to give these something like a background. Each part being confined to the character frame prevents it looking terribly dynamic as a whole, but that's unavoidable and the problem lessens the fewer parts are present at once; I just wanted to see the whole range lined up.

I'm fairly happy with the new parts. They were fun to make, and they look better than the first two tentacles without obviating them. Eyestalks are a little cliché but the dual-eye tentacle with that weird puil works well enough for me. The mouth seems a little bare, even with the corded look to its "neck". I could carefully pattern the hide. In fact, some kind of minor shading or patterning seems like it would be a good idea for all of the tentacle bits. No rush though.

Trying for two new skill icons based on these; the eyes and the beak seem distinctive enough and would have obvious uses.

Still feel a little guilty about how simple tentacles are. These were fun to make and involved enough decision-making that they weren't trivial, but they don't feel "real." I'm sure I'll come up with something new soon enough. Lately I've been skitting about between themes. It's good to add breadth to old ideas, but lacking focus means lots of staring at a blank sheet of paper with no particular idea what I should be trying to do.

Thugs and brains

Generic dock toughs. They should fit nicely alongside the various sea cultists and mutants in the corrupt port town. Not exactly in line with my plans, but then little ever is.

I think it's the swaggering pose that sells them. They're also nice and simple in the design - a return to form. The lines of the jacket are a bit clumsy still, but you wouldn't know from the final output.

#1 had concerns. His cutlass hilt was a trial and I'm still not happy with it. His hat is fine on its own, but when colouring him any bright colours made him look like a YMCA member. It's probably the bare chest that does it.

Hmm - speaking of bare chests, I've just realised that #1's sling-strap-thing and #3's scar run the same direction. I should probably flip one of them so that it doesn't look like a pattern. #3, most likely, since now that I think about it that kind of scar would likely go top right to lower left, if inflicted by a right-handed opponent.

I also returned to the hospital of horrors. No variants though - I think these are the "boss monsters" of the area. Graft-spiderman's skeleton is too distinctive to reskin and I can't come up with any worthwhile ideas for scalpelwoman.

Spider-guy's really loaded for bear. Bonesaw, scalpels, syringe, trolley, even a cloth for his brow! A surgical genius who decided he could do so much better with an extra pair of hands.

Scalpelina's something I promised I wouldn't so. Leggy woman in heels. I tried so hard to avoid the sexy nurse cliché, but the sketch just... happened. And I liked it. I'm still wavering over whether she's too long and spindly, the leg is a little unconvincing and the swoosh of the coat is bizarre. But nevertheless, I like. At least she's flat-chested. Maybe I'll come back to her tomorrow and, with the benefit of fresh eyes, despair over the anatomy and start over.

Still, I can overlook dumbsexy a little for the sake of a boss character. And I do really like the pose with the scalpel and clipboard. If Dr Spider is the frothing nutjob, she's the obsessive badass. They could each support their own staff, or combine forces in the same hospital. Who can tell. She was originally going to have a fuckoff hypodermic, but that was harder to look cool than I expected. Happier with the scalpel.

Strange rituals.

Tarted up the acolytes like I said I would. Not entirely happy with them still I don't think, but they're closer to par than they were.

I've been flat-fill colouring just to make things look slightly more presentable, and I'm growing to like it. It looks a lot neater than my pathetic attempts at manual shading, and needless to say it's quicker and easier. I could still do some details manually - glow on those flames for example. I'm certainly happy with it as a standby at least.

The revised acolytes look a little less priesty and a little more townsfolky. I do not dislike this. I'd still like a set of suspicious townsfolk, but my last try ended up as a pig farmer. On the plus side - pig farmer!

Brine mutant update

Lost interest in "sea hound" concept. Townsfolk still planning. Pared down brine mutants.

Crusty sea bastards

Brine mutants! Miscellaneously hideous deformed salt-water mutants. Been trying to do these for ages, even got a complete set of three done previously but I junked them for being shit. The hunchbacked cloth-wrapped look was the breakthrough.

Still. Mixed feelings. I like a lot about these guys, but my node discipline is totally out the window on them. Way, way too much detail. I should really try to tune them down a bit, but it's hard to suss where to make the cuts. I could de-weather the clothes, take out all the nicks and tears. That wouldn't actually educe the node count so much, but they'd look a bit more appropriate. I'm hoping that with all their gribbly fishy bits and pose they don't need the robes to be ragged to give the right impression.

Feet. The feet are bullshit. No variation even. But, the problem is that sea creatures don't have feet, so what do sea-mutant feet look like? I could maybe do one with multiple crab-leg-type feet, but then what for the third? Tentacles look really messy and both they and the crab feet would be excessive detail on top of so many existing fiddly bits. But patchwork-looking mutants are all about fiddly bits! There's just no way to do barnacle patches economically. Those fish finny things I like so much are a lot of smooth lines and blank space, so they're probably cool. Ditto the tentacles on gamma. Maybe the shell-growths on gamma could be streamlined? Fewer layers, maybe remove the ridge lines and hope that the outline implies enough? Tricksy. I'm not confident.

Still. I'm happy to have finally gotten a workable base for the concept. With these guys I've almost got a complete "brine mutants" bestiary. Sea zombies, crab guys, cultists, the priest, tentacles, these guys and the fish-monster. Well, looking back over them the acolytes are really boring, so I'd want to tart those up. And maybe make the crab guys' pose less symmetrical, but that's less bothersome to me.

Hmm. I've been pushing on a lot so far, being resistant to multiple iterations. Maybe this is a good time to change modes and polish up a few for a themed set. Do I have enough? I will brainstorm other things I could add to the set:

• More zombies. Possibly of a different type. Bloated? Ghoul-type with weapons?
• Dedicated sea-necromancer? Fish-bone staff? Gravedigger?
  
• Townsfolk with minor mutations. Improvised weaponry; boathooks, cleavers, harpoons.
• Some kind of "hound" sea beast that is sicced on people? Need a good hook. Ooh - I might have an old sketch I can repurpose...
• Abominations? Mutants gone too far, extra-gribbly. Could be easy, might be too cheap. Don't want to over-weight the mutant mosters angle compared to the cult angle.
  
• Little creepy familiar/imp-type fish critters.
• Townsfolk with creepy little fish critters. maybe mothers cradling them like children? Too creepy? Too hard to standardise? Possibly so.

Hmm - more possibilities than I expected. I think I'll look into the townsfolk gone bad and the sea-hound first, with advanced zombies fermenting in the back of my head (ew).

Lots of words. Must make more pictures.

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...

Squagus and friends.

It's short for "squid magus". Placeholder names are fun, in that they don't have to make sense to anybody but myself. Favourite so far: "psycho cheeseborg". What can I say; it quacked like a duck.

The squagus himself has been in this semi-finished state for some time - I did him during my brine mutant phase. I wasn't happy with him though. Shapeless robe, symmetrical pose and gribbly tentacles. Too easy. Lazy. The only bit even vaguely interesting is the gill-fin-ear shape on the side of the head.

Anyway, today I was squiggling (squiddling?) and I got two semi-satisfactory giant tentacles. I'd always intended to do some giant tentacles for the brine mutants, but... hadn't. Tentacles are both easy and hard to do. They're a very simple shape and vector drawing makes curves a breeze. But they need to have a certain amount of itnerest to be worth doing at all and twisting shapes with a definite cross-section are tricky for me to think around. These are a barely acceptable kludge to me.

To make them match up with the squagus I quickly block-filled them. Those blue-green things at their bases are emant to be water-splashes, like the tentacles are bursting up out of the sea. They're supposed to be the limbs of some huge krakenish thing the squagus has summoned. Possibly even the cult's elder fish god.

Tentacles. Not terribly exciting, but necessary to me. And I'm warming (a little) to the squagus, when he's in their company. Maybe. Ish.

Fish-followers

Still trying to just power on through with my laughable attempts at colouring. Shitty as they are, I'm finding that colour makes the characters seem a lot more substantial than they do as linearts. Besides, you can't keep crying over every mistake; you just keep on trying until you run out of the will to continue.

These are cultists of some kind. I intended them to be members of the elder fish-god cult, but they came out looking a little generic, bar the odd skin tone. That book they all carry is the blasphemous and eldritch text of their cult.

I don't know what I was thinking giving them torches - a light source (coloured one even!) being carried by a character really makes life harder. I mostly managed by ignoring it, which makes thes guys look slightly worse than usual. I like the polished bronze effect on the torches and the censer (in case you were wondering what Charlie was carrying) but it makes the rest of them look even worse by comparisson.

I'm not sure about them all having the exact same shade of robe. I might go back and tint two of them a little. Probably desaturate the oddly colourful elritch texts too. But that's stuff to ponder later - these aren't meant to be usable-quality after all, they're a learning experience.

One thing I am happy about is how much better these guys look than my first cultist attempt. He had an open book, whcih was pretty neat, and a decent-looking hood. Unfortunately he was looking straight into the camera with a perfectly symmetrical pose. It looked terrible. I'm trying (not necessarily succeeding) to avoid cheaty boring symmetrical poses. I figure it's good discipline to try and get a little motion into the stances, or at least a 3/4 viewpoint. I figure I should confront bad habbits and crutches - although maybe just one at a time, eh?

The rope-belts are weird. They have volume, when I usually "paint" details like that on for the sake of simplicity. But it actually turned out "cheaper" in terms of lines and nodes to do them that way. I discovered the same thing when I wanted to give a dog a collar. I doubt anyone other than me will notice though. Maybe the rope belts need trailing ends to look more ropy. it would also add a little more interest to the big flat boring robe areas.

Other stuff that I'm sort-of working on:
A hungry velociraptor. A mad doctor's assistant (nurse maybe?) if I can ever work out what they should be holding. A many-armed surgical frankenstein. Some kind of gorilla, or possibly just burly man-thing. - I don't know, all I have is a silhouette so far, but I like it.

Show them the way to go home. Tired, bed, etc.

No colours today, I've been mostly embarrassing myself as far as colour goes lately. Some new linearts though.

Whaler/harpooner guys! The stance didn't come across quite the way I sketched it, but its close enough that I'm willing to say "sod it".

I didn't make a deliberate effort to have interchangeable parts here, but I can't see any reason why head and leg swaps wouldn't work.

I'm thinking these are hero-types like the swashbuckler/duellist lady, though they're a smidgen light on details for that. Then again, after I tarted them up so as to have three varieties.... they might be ok after all.

This other fella's a little weird. I'm still testing how to do gribbly monsters in a style identifiably similar to the stick-men. The problem is that heavy abstraction like one-dimensional limbs only really work when the brain knows what it's looking for.

It also didn't help that I had no real design for this critter - just a vague plan of squooshing an eel and a crab otgether. He may well end up being junked, but it's a learning experience at least. (Psst - don't look to closely at the silly crab arms.)

Obviously he goes with the drowned zombies and crab mutants. I was going to call him a brine-spawn, but he doesn't really look mutated enough to be a spawn - more like just a weird species of eel-crab. Moray crab? Congar crab? I don't know. Won't matter unless I end up keeping him I guess.

I'm surprising myself with my discipline, sticking mostly to the sea and sea-mutant theme. I'd have expected to have gotten distracted by now. Well, I tried to be distracted when I made three insane surgeons, but trying to colour those sent me back to the briny.

I suspect I'll go back to them though; I want to do some frankensteined-up "surgical success" hulks and some shambling "surgical failure" zombies. Mainly because I like the idea of having a strain of monster named "surgical success" contrasting with a strain called "surgical failure". Why use reams of explanatory text when you can use naming and context!

Briiiines.

Sea zombies. Drowned dead? Brine zombies? Need a catchy name. They're supposed to fit alongside the brine mutants of course. I'm trying for a "Davy Jones, the necromancer from Innsmouth" vibe with all these briny fellows.

Not really happy with the colouring. I think that two or three shades per area is necessary to stop them looking flat, but two-tone shading is not my forte. What is this "uniform light source" you talk of? The boots are especially embarassing. Maybe I'll get the hang of it later on, or just come up with something better. I am fairly content with the fleshy areas. Just darkening the edges seems to work there, especially with the raw pink areas.

Modelwise, I didn't bother with swappable parts here. Instead they all have schticks. I suppose that I could mix them up with some barnacles, a little seaweed and decay on all of them, but I've a feeling that the effect wouldn't be as strong. I might come back and make another variation or two. Chains could be nice except that I've not come up with a good way to do them in this style. Maybe one with an anchor stuck through him?

By the way, stick-figure zombies are hard. I only really have the chest and head to display injuries on. The empty eye sockets were a good idea, but something that really requires colour to pull off. Tattered clothing is a nice short-hand, but all those ragged edges takes a lot of nodes. Ditto the seaweed and the barnacles. I did so many passes on these guys, trimming away excess nodes and trying to make the more simplified shapes look right. But there's only so far you can take barnacles before they stop looking like barnacles.

In a way it's easier to do sea zombies than the regular kind - I can cover sea zombies in "drowned" props that imply deadness without having to do tricksy injuries. My tentative experiments with vanilla zombies are, so far, unsatisfying. I'm thinking of giving them mouths as a visual cue. In an emergency I could always carry over the empty eyesockets look - though I intended that to be specific to the sea zombies. Ah well - that's a problem for the future.

Hmm, how many types of zombies can I do, anyway? Drowned is one. Traditional risen dead is another. Surgically reanimated, frankenstein style. Animated by some kind of parasite/fungus/disease (bloated, bits sticking out) is another. It'd be nice if I could manage to skip traditional zombies completely, but I have a gravedigger peep that I'm pretty happy with. Hmm. Anyway, I'd probably use a different base model for each variety, which should help avoid too much sameness.