Hi-res Mortasheen & Raw Art Files: Scarbuncle

https://bogleech.com/mortasheen/scarbuncle.htm

I mentioned this on tumblr, but this monster was inspired by the style of the Gegebomajuu (https://bogleech.com/halloween/hall19-gegebomajuu.html) though who's to say if it really shows or not.

I used to have some plastic egg toys that could unfold into "dinosaurs," and the result were these ridiculous reptilian creatures whose bodies were still just eggs. I think I was channeling those when this design came to me, and I knew I wanted its body to be pockmarked something weaponized.

An early idea was that it'd be covered in crater-like pits that vent some sort of gas, but that felt kind of too expected for Mortasheen. A creature that grows independent weapons from its body, meanwhile, feels expected but isn't really something I explored enough until recently. I immediately wanted it to generate traps it could lay out, something I also touched on with one of the "scrap" monsters a year or so ago.

My earliest sketches of this monster's head also had the toothy, beaky gums bending away from each other, something seen in a few pterosaurs and deep sea fish, but the addition of a second set of teeth and lips surrounding it, like the sandworms from Beetlejuice, was last-minute and I'm still not quite sure if I like how that came out or not. I wanted it to have more of a maniacal, smiling look to it, but instead it came out with more of an innocent baby bird look, which I like but have also used in a lot of other designs.

I also messed around with various color schemes, but my first visual of the creature was pale whitish, and nothing else felt quite right. The killer boils also went through many, MANY changes, from pac-man-like biting orbs (something I'd still like to use for another monster) to prickly thornballs to explosive tangles of "roots," but I kept coming back to a starfish-like design, and wound up modeling them after a specific group of "pumpkin sea stars" found in the deep ocean.