July MOTM: Nightmarish corvid monster - concept sketch + design commentary // sfw

shoutout again to ky and drakochan, who both suggested a MOTM monster based on crows/ravens/corvids! 

the first thing that popped into my mind when i started brainstorming a 'nightmarish corvid monster' was the silhouette of an unnaturally long torso with several arms attached to it. i started out by concept sketching this silhouette, focusing entirely on the outline and overall impression of it. i had to re-draw and tweak it a bit before it looked like my mental image in terms of proportions and posture. i've included all those little silhouette doodles at the top of the image above so you can see how it progressed from the rather stiff first attempt to a sketch with more personality and a more interesting stance. even just changing the posing of her legs from standing tall and straight to bent and stalking gave her more character.

i then started figuring out the details, using black, grey, and white brushes to 'sculpt' a figure from my sketch of a black silhouette. the bottom right sketch shows the final design i eventually arrived at.

i decided to cover her body partly with the black feathering you'd expect of a corvid monster, and partly with black fur that's so coarse, short, and rough it looks borderline leathery. her raven-shaped neck, her back, and the base of her tail are covered with long feathers that are so shaggy and disheveled they look kind of oily. she's got some tufts of thin feathers and long, horsehair-esque hairs along her joints as well, and little bits of fur sticking out at odd angles all over her body, emphasising that coarse texture. she's supposed to look rough and leathery to the touch, there's nothing smooth or even about her design.

she's very tall and her body is bony and tough, with musculature that feels hard and sinewy (a bit like air-dried meat, if that makes sense?). you can see the bones and sinews shift under her leathery hide, and at some places the texture of it almost looks more like exposed musculature and ligament. her feet resemble bird feet but with a dew claw rather than a backwards-facing talon. the anatomy of her hands is humanoid, but they (as well as her feet) are covered with bird foot scaling and crowned by curved talons. as for her tail it most resembles a lizard's tail in shape, save for the messy tufts of feathers and long, coarse hairs at the base and end of it.

the smaller sketch on the mid-left shows a few different features i experimented with adding, some of which i discarded before finalising the design. i thought about giving her wings that almost looked furred rather than feathered, to underline her coarse and shaggy look, and with claws along the edges. i toyed with the idea of having smoke billow out her mouth, which could have created a cool eerie effect of ribbons of smoke snaking around her. i also tried adding prehensile tentacles (with the same texture as the rest of her body) to her 'mane' and the base of her tail (... which i realise just looks like a couple of extra tails, lol). 

but looking at that sketch i felt like all those things at once was a bit too much. it seemed like in my effort to make her look as nightmarish as possible i had just added as many weird features as i could think of, piling one onto the other. there was a lot of things going on, especially since her whole body has so much texture, too. i decided that less is more, so i removed the wings and instead of a smoky beak i gave her a smoky voice. i kept the tentacles because i like the way they make her silhouette look more unusual and less 'predictable'--you would expect a bird monster to have wings, not tentacles. her bird head, the feathery mass at her tail, bird-like fingers and feet, feathers, and black colour scheme ensures she still has a very corvid vibe, even without wings.

her head is very much based on a raven's head, with the addition of a few creepy features. the inside of her beak is inspired by a goose mouth, with the rows of teeth along the beak and the edges of the tongue. speaking of, her tongue can grow long and split into many tendrils, though that detail didn't make it into the final painting. we all know how much i like eye imagery, especially in the context of horror designs - i think that adding an abundance of eyes is a surefire way to make something look more strange and eerie. i covered her face and part of her neck with extra eyes, all of them drawn with wrinkly eyelids that make them look more unsettling than if they had been surrounded by a smooth and even texture. to top it all off i love the idea of her making those clicking, rattling, croaking noises that seem like sound effects taken straight out of a horror movie or game. 

i knew i wanted to go for a victorian gothic kind of horror look for both the pairing and painting, and out of that intention sprung the idea to make the human partner look eerie and ghostly by putting them in a white dress. you can't see much detail on the painting so the design of it just looks 19th century-esque in a rather nondescript way. i actually used to be super into victorian clothing, though, so if i draw it again i'll make sure to make it look more period accurate--i think i want it to be from the 1850s. in any case it's not necessarily a wedding dress, but once i added a veil it sure looks like one. at first i was going to wrap her eyes in a white blindfold, but as we know i'm weak for veil imagery and thought it would make her look even more creepy. at first i meant for her to be a regular human with a monster bae, but once she turned out so spooky (especially what with the shadowy eyes behind the veil) i rather feel like she's a classic white lady type of ghost. i can just imagine her haunting an big old victorian mansion, and then one day her monster girlfriend creeps out of the darkest shadows. 

// art + characters © me.