Writing 3 (blog posts) for Crit 2

Time for round 2 of demon designs for my webcomic. To be honest, I was frustrated with how the last critique went. My fellow students didn't really seem to listen to me when I said that the three were meant to be designs and not "art pieces". I wanted feedback on if they were scary or not, and how to improve them. They wanted each to have a backstory, which I can understand for more important demons (Of which there will be a few). For those, I do have backstories because they're involved more in the story and need to be more developed character-wise. However, these monsters I'm designing for class are meant to be 'monsters of the week.' They will appear, be scary, then be defeated, probably to never show up again. It felt like I repeated this dozens of times but nobody listened and continued to look at the designs as art pieces, which isn't how I'm intending these to be taken.

Here's what I have so far. For these, I used ink and watercolor pencils.

 

Carlie Gernhart- Demon Design 4

  

Carlie Gernhart - Demon Design 5

 

I intend to have at least one more demon design by friday.  These are still oddly therapeutic to work on and are a great stress reliever. :)  While I've been looking at Stephen Gammell a lot for inspiration, I've also been browsing around the web. I've found an artist on Deviantart who goes by the username Atenebris who has amazing and creepy creature design:

 

Shamo by Atenebris 

 

Rigel by Atenebris

 

Kitty by Atenebris

I love how elegant and intimidating the first two are, and the eyes on the third make me want to play around with lighting effects more. It's also interesting to me how the last picture uses a color range not usually associated with scary things (it seems to have a cooler, cyan-ish tint to it, with a bit of magenta).

This week I'd also like to draw your attention to the awesome work of Mattie Parrigon:

http://mattieparrigon.blogspot.com/2016/01/writing-blog-posts1.html 

I really like her portraits, and like the sketchy quality her lines. Her series of nursing home portraits are my favorite of her works that I've seen so far (I'm particularly fond of the picture of the old man with the tattoos).