To begin, I decide to make a temporary alliance between my Creature Design class and the Seeing Sideways class. The main point of this was to help me practice some steps of creative design, while also working on a subject that I enjoy. For a bit of backstory, I created a Leviathan type creature in the Creature Design class that is approximately 2100 feet from head to tail. A creature of this size could host an entire ecosystem of other creatures, some of them being human sized or larger. For this, I began developing a creature that can live inside a leviathan as a parasite. I used a digital medium to write out some of the attributes and descriptions of the animal. Some of these are listed below:
Type of creature: Crustacean
9 foot in diameter carapace, 8 legs, 4 claws (two large, two small).
Antennae have enlarged to provide additional sensory detail of the environment around the crustacean.
Bioluminescent panels developed under the eyes to light the area immediately below and in front of the creature to allow sight in the dark but minimize light saturation in the area around the creature.
The crustacean is omnivorous and prefers to eat decaying material, which can be beneficial as long as the leviathan has decaying flesh to be rid of.
This was a sample of the writing needed for the Creature Design class, but is also part of the basis for the creative process in making this creature. Secondly, I needed to transfer the information provided by this original digital medium and convert it to a non digital medium. For this, I sketched out how the creature might look. I am not a very good drawing artist, so it's really not accurate to how I plan it to look like. Here it is below:
I really should have drawn a person next to it to compare the scale in size, but the carapace (the body shell area) is around 9 feet in diameter excluding the legs and claws, so it's a pretty big size. While the creature drawn is the same as the creature described in both these mediums, they are slightly different, mainly by how they are portrayed. When we read how a design is, we can picture it in our own minds, but it won't be the same image as another person who reads the same description. This is mostly due to different interpretations that people have, such as how people might say the same words differently. With an image, we can see exactly how it looks, but will have different ideas on how the creature might act or behave in an environment. The reasoning is the same as before, but for different reasons.
For the final transition of the Media Round Robin, it's time to go back to the digital medium. For this, I brought the sketch into Photoshop and colored it and tried to give it a type of texture. My skills in Photoshop are on par with my skills in drawing (that doesn't say much about either) but here it is:
I realized that when I was done, that the creature looks kind of like a merging between Kabuto and a lobster. It's kind of frustrating on how I feel as though anything that I draw seems to look like something else that has already been done before. The idea is fairly original (keep in mind that "Simpsons did it") and the design may be interesting, but I'm just not able to draw in order to portray things in ways that I feel satisfied with. I did have fun experimenting with the brush tool in Photoshop to add a texture to the shell of the crustacean, but it just looks (at least to me) like something that's probably been done before, if not already a creature in real life somewhere in the ocean.
Overall, the assignment was helpful and fun in certain ways, but it also brought back to light on how I'm not able to portray images from my mind into pictures on paper. I figure that the best I can do is to create stories on things that I want to bring into the world, and perhaps have someone with actual artistic drawing or photoshop skills help me to make a better image that can actually be seen rather than perceived.
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