bradleyknoxfmp

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Now that the sculpt had been finished and baked I could paint it. Starting off with a grey base coat so the colours would look better on the sculpt and the paint doesn’t paint well on the texture of the hardened clay so giving it a solid base coat with a spray can allows an easier paint.

Now the base coat was down I could actually paint the colour the sculpt would be. I mixed black,white and pink to create a grey colour with a subtle flesh undertone and applied it to the sculpt and then used a sponge to dab away the marks of the bristles.

For parts of the body I wanted more defined like the muscles I painted in a little bit of black just to make the creature look more skinny and hollow.

Next was the head which the only part of the creature that has fur so I started off painting the head black but being careful around the ears and mouth as I’d paint them red later. Painting the head was quite challenging at some points like when the fur stops at the neck so I had to be careful and paint the strands of hair.

I then mixed red and black to create a dark red that I used for the inside of the ears and mouth and then mixed pink and red for the tongue but kept adding black so it got darker and wouldn’t be overly colourful compared to rest and weirdly stand out.

I then made a dark grey and brushed that over the head so it wasn’t solid black and also allowed the black to remain in the crevasses of the sculpts so the strands of hair were able to stand alone better. I painted the eyes a light grey and added a highlight to the nose as I felt it got lost in the painting process. I then painted the teeth and claws a bone colour.

I then put some green and muddy colour onto the pallet and dipped a sponge in it and dabbed it on the sculpt to show grass and mud stains on the creatures skin which adds character to the sculpt and will involve it more with its forest landscape which I will make as a base.

I think overall it turned out really well and is pretty close to my illustrations. Of course some changes has to be made but nothing that drastically changed the vision in my head. Some of the teeth and claws snapped off in the painting process which I can hopefully add some new ones and there’s a crack in the arm and tail that I’m unsure how to hide but other than that I’m really proud with the outcome and it will look much better once I finish the base and put it into an environment.

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For the poster for my FMP I decided to go for an old blurry photograph, inspired by the supposed photos of the Loch Ness Monster and Big Foot and photos of UFO’s.

My creature is an urban legend that many people don’t think exist similar to the Loch Ness Monster and Big Foot so I think having a low quality photograph as the poster would be appropriate and on theme.

The famous photo of the Loch Ness Monster was taken by gynaecologist Kenneth Wilson. It was published in the Daily Mail on April 21st 1934 where it was known as the ‘surgeon’s photo’ as Kenneth Wilson did not want his name linked with the photograph.

The photo was revealed to be a hoax 57 years later in 1991. The photo was actually a toy submarine built by a man called Christian Spurling, the son in law of Marmaduke Wetherell a 1930’s screenwriter. Christian admitted it was a hoax at the age of 93.

Bigfoot or otherwise known as Sasquatch is a prominent figure in North America and Canadian folklore.

The famous image of the Sasquatch is actually from a film from 1967 that the film makers say was a real recording of Bigfoot. The footage was shot in North Carolina and has had many people attempt to debunk or prove its legitimacy.

The footage is a 3 minute long motion picture of the North Carolinian wildlife and someone riding a horse around the two minute mark the person behind the camera notices the walking ape and runs towards it to get a better shot. Because of the low quality and shakiness when the person starts running it’s hard to get an actual look at the supposed Bigfoot and therefore could easily be a man in a gorilla costume.

#Youtube

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To create the base I sculpted it out of a slab of clay and added more clay or took it away depending on how big I wanted it. I placed my sculpt on the base to decided if I should add more clay so it had room to stand. The clay was really easy to work with and as it was on such a large scale I could shape the clay any I wanted. Once the base was a good enough size I started on the terrain, the base would be cast so and high areas needed to be lower so it would reverse when the cast was poured in so I rolled out an area of the base to make it lower and then using more clay add in a cliff face and a slope to transition from the high to low area. The monster would be standing on the lower section so I didn’t need the high part to be that large and I did end up making it smaller to give the sculpt more room.

Using a rock, I dabbed it onto the base and it gave it a very convincing dirt texture and then used more rocks and in printed them in the base so they’ll be raised in the final product, this will creat actual rocks which I can then paint.

Now that the base was done it was time to cast it so I built up a wall to contain the liquid. The wall needed to be all the same height so no liquid spilled over the top and thick so it wouldn’t collapse trying to contain the cast. Once that was done I checked again and added to clay to reinforce and flimsy areas and then created the cast solution and poured it in.

The cast is made with water and a powder that when mixed turns into a thick liquid but the more you mix the less viscous the liquid becomes and then you can pour it in.

The liquid will be left to harden over the night and then I’ll be able to removes the cast and now paint over it and add decorations.

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I marked at the size of the base and where objects would go and the terrain. I spread the objects out as much I could so that no area of the base looked bare but making sure to retain the main focus which is the sculpt, and area where there aren’t trees or rocks will still be covered with grass and moss so I don’t think those areas will look barren.

But it was also important to me that the base look good as well which is why I’ve included the raised area to give the base some height and make it look natural and include a slope and a straight drop as part of the hill. It doesn’t need to be too high otherwise it’ll take the focus away from the sculpt but high enough for the base to look like an actual forest.

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I drew up a rough draft of what the base of the sculpture would look like. I’m still going to a woodland area like previously mentioned but now a base is going to be cast so I have the capability to create a more diverse terrain by adding higher and lower parts of the ground which is much better and impressive to look at then a flat base. Once the base is cast then I will add dirt, moss, trees and such to create the environment.

To get a rough idea of what this would look like I took photos of another students base and it looks really good so I’m excited to create my own and I think the base will really sell my creature.

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I made the claws separately and baked them separately too and then used a tool to make a hole in the feet and put the claws in. But to begin with I made the claws to small so they weren’t able to be wedged in enough so I remade them longer so they had room to be pushed into the clay.

Claws add ferocity to the sculpt and shows my creature is dangerous and meant to kill.

The teeth were the same process but due to the small area of the mouth it was difficult to place them in right. In all my illustrations of my creature it had many teeth as one of its main characteristics so I didn’t want to leave it out. I understood that having as many teeth as I wanted would be unrealistic so I wanted to find a solution that included less teeth but enough to still be quite a few. The solution of giving the creature fangs was proposed but that went against my vision of the creature’s look. I managed to fit in six physical teeth and found ways to create the illusion of more teeth. The first was to sculpt teeth into the mouth as like a second set of teeth similar to sharks the other was to sculpt a tongue hanging out of the mouth over the side to suggest that the other teeth are under the tongue.

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Starting to think about the base my creature I thought a forest area would be most appropriate and easiest to achieve. What’s important that it’s easy to do but makes sense in context of the character, a forest would be a perfect place to hunt for food, hide behind trees and often used in horror films and games.

To portray the idea of my monster sneaking in the woods I’ve placed two sticks ,which in scale to the sculpt look like trees, to have my monster walking inbetween and having the monster inbetween the trees makes it look like it’s interacting with the environment and not just a base to stand on.

I then looked at similar images online and didn’t find anything like I was going for but saw lots of images of animals poking their heads out of trees. I placed the sticks in front of the sculpt to see how this would look but of course it obstructed the face so I decided to place the sticks where people could admire the entirety of the sculpt.

For the rest of the base I’ll just use natural resources like moss, grass, sticks and stones to make the woodland.

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To add a slight texture to skin I brushed over the sculpt with a dry brush so the bristles where hard enough to leave marks. Though the marks aren’t that visible it’s better than having completely smooth skin.

I brushed all over but especially on parts that are actually visible, underneath parts like the chest and belly I didn’t bother making it that viable or going over it again if it faded because no one is really going to under there.

Because the brush was hard it was picking up clay and leaving bubbly bits, I left some because it gave the illusion of dry skin but others were a bit too big so I lightly brushed over the sculpt to get rid of any pieces of clay picked up but not leave any more marks.

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I added fur to the head of my creature by making a worm shapes and placing it onto the head. I would then intertwine these worms to make it look like knotted and unkempt hair.

Using the side of a tool I would carve in additional strands of hair to make it look like theirs more strands than there is.

Where the hair connects to the head I just carved in strands to make the transition more seamless and to show the hairs getting longer as it moved away from the head.

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My sculpt will have to be put on a base so I’d have to find away to decorate it and make sure it matches the environments that I’ve chosen my creature to be found in. When decorating bases for miniatures or sculpts people often have fake grass, rocks, dirt et cetera apart of their kit, as I don’t have any of that I’ll most likely have to use real materials which shouldn’t be too hard.

The most easy area to make into a base would be a field. I’d paint the base brown or green and put grass or moss onto the base, I think moss would work better as the grass wouldn’t be standing it would just be scattered on the base and wouldn’t look good and then I find some pebbles which compared to the sculpt will look the size of rocks or some twigs as a tree trunk which would place my monster in a forest setting.

To tie the base to the horror theme and to involve it more with a character to make it look the creature is apart of the base and not just something to stand on I could sculpt some bones or a dead animal below the monster and have it eating. This would allow me to paint in some blood which would further reinforce the horror theme of the sculpt.

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John Constantine is a character from DC comics and appears in his own comics, his own movie starring Keanu Reeves and the CW series Legends of Tomorrow.

Constantine is an occult detective so he deals with the more magical elements of the DC Universe.

He first appeared in Swamp Thing #37 in 1985 and was created by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette and John Totleben. Alan Moore’s most notable work is the creation of The Watchmen.

I think the demons from the 2005 film ‘Constantine’ resembles my creature the most.

The grey and tight to the muscles skin is very similar to mine and the long limbs too. I really like the texture of the skin it looks like an old persons all dry and I wonder if I can find a way to texture my creatures skin in the same or similar way. I think using a dry and rough bristled brush would be an effective way to texture skin by just brushing it across the sculpt so it leaves the marks of the bristles creating the wrinkles and then dabbing the brush to create pours in the skin, and the grey/brown colour of the skin will also contribute to making it look dry.

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Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is a 2005 clay stop motion film. This is a less realistic approach to a model of a monster because Wallace and Gromit is a children programme so children needs something to be less frightening and cartoon-like so they don’t associate it with real life and can tell it’s a fictional monster.

I’ve decided to make more scary and realistic monster because that’s what I like, as I’ve grown older I’ve began to like the horror genre and monsters and I appreciate the design of monsters and what makes them scary and what goes into horror films to make them scary wether it be jumpscares, violence or pure disturbing stuff. Camera angles like the Dutch Tilt and sound design also play a huge part, horror movies need to be visually weird to upset the audience’s brains especially in tense situations to trigger the same emotions that the character on screen is feeling. I think a lot of horror movies nowadays are quiet stale and rely on jumpscares which after awhile become predictable and that’s the opposite of what they should be, films like the Conjuring series and Insidious are guilty of this and therefore produce mediocre horror films. Films like this most often have a monster as an antagonist like a demon which is normally just a guy running around screaming or in makeup like in Insidious.

I don’t really like any monsters from horror movies, none really come to mind that are horrifying to look at which is why I think monsters are best in horror games as they don’t have to rely on costume design and all expenses that come along with making something like that and that’s why my monster is more associated with horror games more than movies because monsters work better in a video game.

If I had the time I would definitely make my character more disturbing as that’s what I think is the best way to illicit emotion when doing something in the horror genre, films like Hereditary and Midsommar rely more on a disturbing plot than cheap jumpscares.

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Because my creature has mutated into an apex predator everything about it is perfect for it to be the best it can at hunting. Cats and dogs both have amazing hearing and can around 64 kHz which is 1.6 octaves above a human.

kHz is short for Kilohertz which is a measure of frequency and means 1000 cycles per second and one cycle is one hertz so cats can hear 64,000 hertz of sound whilst humans can only hear 20kHz so 20,000 hertz.

Because cats have pinpoint hearing when hunting they wait and listen for sounds of animals or movement and then strike their prey from help with their precise hearing, this applies to my creature that waits in the darkness and sneaks upon its prey.

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For the cars interior I wanted to make it look like a 90’s/00’s look.

I thought that a modern car interior wouldn’t fit the fit the horror genre with all the fancy screens so I went with something a bit more straightforward and something that fit the world better.

The late 90’s and early 00’s is when survival horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill were extremely popular and games like those are heavily inspiring my creature and so I want to place it in the same time period as those games.

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Inspired by the open sequence from the horror game Outlast I wanted a to do a point of view illustration of a driver at night stumbling across my creature eating in the midd of the road.

I made sure to do illustrate it in the same style as i illustrated the creature so heavy outlines and really rough and followed the same process of sketching then outlining and then colouring but this time with the added effects of the car lights and the displays in the car lighting up, this was simple enough just a case of drawing a yellow circle with white in the middle and then blurring it and something similar goes for the green screens inside the car but this time making a new layer underneath the green and blurring that so the screens lit up because if I lit up a single layer then it would just be blurry green and not look like anything. I then also added some text to show the time and temperature and experimented with some rainfall but didn’t like it so I decided not to do it as it was bit too much.

I’ve created this scene because I’ve always liked the look of late night driving especially on backroads and the head lights lighting up the narrow, uneven roads in the middle of nowhere and thought it was spooky so it was a perfect location to place my creature.

Because I was using the scene from Outlast as a reference I forgot to change the side of the steering wheel as my creatures meant to lurk in England’s countryside but I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much.

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Like cats and owls my creature is a nocturnal hunter and so it can see in the dark.

Night vision works by capturing natural light and amplifying it. So if an area has no light then night vision is not able to capture and so it doesn’t work. Although night vision is affective it would only work if moonlight or another source of light was provided so that’s a major set back.

What’s more effective though is thermal imaging. Thermal imaging captures the heat coming off of objects and transfers it into light, so colder objects are darker and warmer objects are brighter. When applying this predators it helps distinguish prey as their warm bodies would be brighter than the natural surroundings.

Some animals that can see this spectrum of light are mosquitoes, bats, snakes and some beetles.

Although my cat/dog creature is based on animal that can not see this sort of life it has mutated to suit its predatorily needs and this way of seeing is defiantly best to seek out prey while it lurks at night.

The Predator from the movie franchise is also a creature that is the perfect killing machine and it too sees in thermal vision further showing its capability when hunting.

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Hyena’s are often depicted as villains in many pieces of media like The Lion King and The Joker has two of them for pets called Bud and Lou in the Batman Animated Series.

Hyenas tend to dig up graves and eat the person buried and attack children and livestock and so they have been called cowardly animals only attacking something that’s vulnerable or already dead.

Hyena’s hunt in packs called clans and these can have up to 80 hyenas in them. So they gang up on animals such as zebras and leave them with no chance so Hyenas are essentially bullies which makes you understand why they’re villains in cartoons.

As Hyenas are so wild and violent they’re definitely the scariest amongst the dog like animals, so applying these rabid and ruthless elements to my own creature will definitely make it more scary especially the fact of it attacking children and livestock, my creature would attack and eat anything it can get it hands on so my creature would stoop low and attack the vulnerable and weak.