April MOTM: Snow & ice monster concept sketch + design commentary // sfw-ish

if you're thinking "that looks quite different from the snow monster in the painting and the sketch" - you're not wrong. i mean, it's clearly the same character/creature, but some things are rather different. i guess this is a good example of how, for me, it's not uncommon that my monster designs go through some changes and fine-tuning on the way from concept sketch to finished painting.

but let's start from the beginning. there's so many ways you could draw a 'snow and ice' monster, and this wasn't the first idea that came to me. but once this mental image popped into my head, i had to run with it. in short, this monster design is based on the snowy winter forests i grew up with.

her design is very much tied to her element and home habitat. she lives in a forest where it's pretty much always winter. it's full of pine trees and birches, it's covered with snow more often than not, there's heaps of large rocks strewn throughout it, and it's surrounded by snow-capped mountains. in the concept sketch above, her colour scheme is very pale - in the finished art, i ended up giving her fur some ochre tones along her arms and legs, and emphasised the blue hues of the ice more. but even with this more saturated colour scheme she's still well camouflaged among the snow, pines, birch trees, and stones. 

her species has an intricate society and a complex culture that i "accidentally" started developing as i was concepting her. she is herself a hunter; thanks to her strong legs she can run for days on end, and she has incredible grip strength for climbing rocks and trees. (i suspect she first met her girlfriend when they were both out hunting, but that's another story.) 

one of my favourite things about her is her mouth. at first glance it looks kind of 'normal' (well, yknow, for a monster face), but she can actually open it way too far - it can split almost all of her neck in half. it's full of teeth; big ol' canines at the front, and the inside of the rest of her maw is laced with smaller but needle-sharp teeth. if she bites down on you, it'd be near impossible to get free of her grip.

the layers of ice-like plates on her arms and thighs serves as armour and is also useful to deliver heavy blows in close combat. the ice-like plates are very tough, and if they're weakened enough to break it doesn't really hurt her. the 'ice' flakes off in a kind of obsidian-like way, and these flakes are equally sharp and may be used as tools or turned into weapons. the ice plates never stop growing, so a broken plate would slowly grow back, and members of her species have to do regular maintenance lest their arm/thigh-plates become too big and cumbersome. 

that said, i'm thinking that there's a cultural aspect to it as well - some people let their ice plates grow inconveniently big as a marker of social status. y'know, they can't do manual labour/hunt because their arms and legs are weighed down by the icey plates, but it's a statement that 'i'm so rich and important that i don't have to do those things myself, i have servants who do it for me.' other people might still keep their plates a more manageable size, but carve beautiful symbols or patterns into them, or otherwise adorn them for the sake of self-expression (or pure vanity). 

as for the most glaring difference between the concept sketch and the finished art - the presence of the pine 'cape' in the former and its absence in the latter... well, at first i was thinking that pine branches actually sprouted from her fur, that they were organic, pine-like 'feathering' or 'tendrils' rather than legit tree branches. but i ended up not including that feature in the final design at all--it just didn't work. i tried sketching it in, but it looked weird in a messy way, and i felt like the design looked more sleek and coherent without it. however, she might sometimes wear a cape of snow-covered pine branches tied to her shoulders, for the sake of camouflage. 

the floaty ice crystal thing, on the other hand, i didn't leave out on purpose--i just forgot to add it. OOPS. i'll remember it in any future pieces though, since i think it's a neat detail...

// art + character © me.