Making Of 'Gross Worm'
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by Alex Heath |
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When I sat down to create this image I had a rough idea of what I wanted to show. Having played many games of the survival horror genre recently, namely Dead Space and Silent Hill, I decided I wanted to paint a creature that would be right at home in this kind of environment. I wanted the image to have a disturbing feel to it, something that plays on the viewer’s mind, and I have found that a good way to achieve this kind of unease is to mix beauty and innocence with something horrible and scary; the juxtaposition of the two generally causes the viewer to ask questions and feel uneasy about the creature. It sounds horrible; however, for the type of genre it's for, it's actually quite fitting!
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I generally start a new artwork with a quick five-minute sketch to get down what I can see in my mind’s eye. I tend to use line at this stage of the process, rather than blocking in values to make silhouettes, as I find line easier to understand when trying to get an idea down quickly (Fig.01). |
So once the five-minute scribble was down I could then assess what I had against the concept I originally outlined, to see if it would fit with what I had planned to draw. So far so good! The worm-like body is representative of Medusa and the Gorgon sisters, recognisable monster figures; this coupled with the juxtaposition of the women joined to the monster looked just like the kind of creature I was after!
The sketch had some anatomy issues, especially the woman host as she was a bit disproportionate at this stage. This is something I would normally fix at this part of the image creation process if the image was going to take many, many hours of work. I decided, however, to only spend about 2 to 3 hours on the image and approach it as a creature concept, so I figured I would simply fix the issues whilst I rendered, as the sketch was acting more of a guide than a definitive design in this instance.
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When I work on creature and character concepts I generally block out values and details in many passes of greyscale (Fig.02). With each pass I decreased my brush size and added more detail, building up layers of underpainting and playing with design options. The brush I tend to use for this type of refining is a Standard Hard Round brush, with Opacity set to about 70% and Flow to 50%. I used this brush and the Eyedropper tool to blend my values. I find this process very quick, allowing me to change the design at will and to try out many options (Fig.03). |
If you liked reading this tutorial, you may also be interested in the following.
"Making of Concrete 7" by Yang Xueguo
This image was painted with Adobe Photoshop using my “Good Brush Set”, which you can download for free
with this article. To start things off, I began by drawing a simple sketch on paper with the ideas I had in mind.
"Making of Call of Cthulhu" by Giorgio Grecu
This illustration is inspired by the short story Call of Cthulhu by Lovecraft. There is plenty of amazing Cthulhu art
around and I’ve always been fascinated by the subject so I decided to do my own version of it. It’s based on the
part of the story that describes how the sailors accidentally manage to free Cthulhu in the nightmare city of R’lyeh.
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