Collection
Deviation Spotlight
AWFUL HOSPITAL by scythemantis, visual art
- Deviant for 19 years
- www.bogleech.com
I have my own website for my art, bogleech.com ! I don't update Deviantart too much anymore but thank you for continuing to like my stuff on here!
I'm sorry........what????
Mortasheen RPG: Already a Success!
Profile Comments 3.3K
Are you familiar with the Sonic comic by Fleetway Editions? Not really related to your wheelhouse of art, but something full of spookier subject matter than the main series that you might enjoy, particularly some of the more grotesque baddies like Vermin the Cybernik or Megatox.
Hi Roman
holy shit i was gawking at ur art for like the past 3-5 hrs and then found out its YOU!!!! the neocities person. kool
Your monsters remind me of 90's -80's era monster toys but even more
psychedelically coloured, more fleshed out and actually good. I also noticed while reading about your opinions on silent hill monsters that you seem to find Clive barkers works and monster designs like his (mostly human, loads of wounds everywhere in place of possible actually interesting anatomy, and over reliance on sharp bladed objects) very uninspired and derivative.
now I'm not a Clive or hellraiser fan that's come to bitch at you for not liking barker's designs or concepts, hell I've never even seen hellraiser and in terms of me liking monsters like his I have more active appreciation for the suffering game's monster design (old obscure ps2 game with monsters similar to hellraiser) than most of barks work.
all this to say that I was actively thinking about monster designs and my own artistic creativity and how I'd like to portray monsters. like do you personally have any tips in terms of monster desin tropes, how to apply them, or just how to make a monster look unique and a bit different from your bog standard the thing (where the monster has no design cohesion and I just a bunch of things) or pyramid head clone
( just a fucking beefy guy with a mask) and many other notable tropes.
Because god damn was It not that long ago since my monsters looked like every baby's first monster design, bargain basement silent hill X dead space knockoff.
anyway sorry for this long nonsense, also reading this back now I realise the couple of last paragraphs sound beggy and needy, sorry for this mess of a comment lol
Oh no, I like clive barker's designs! They just aren't the kind of horror that fits what Silent Hill was going for or what appealed to me about it; it ends up feeling like the later devs just lifted from horror films they knew rather than trying to keep the franchise's unique identity!
There's really no wrong way to design creatures. Even a setting with the most generically designed monster tropes (straightforward dragon, devil, zombie, etc.) can do all kinds of fun things with them depending on their roles and purposes and characterization.
For coming up with creatures people haven't seen before, though, one thing I use as a shortcut sometimes is to start with a real animal, like let's say a bat, and then keep changing its features until it's not a bat anymore, but it's not necessarily any other recognizable animal. Like, take a bat and change the wings to giant pincers, then maybe change it having huge ears to huge eyes, then change its little tiny bat legs to long storklike ones.
It may feel like there was no point to even beginning with a bat, but the result would be different for every possible animal you began with, especially because the "defining characteristics" would be different; with a bat you have the wings and ears that stand out, but if we started with an elephant we have the ears, tusks and trunk that stand out. Then whatever weird mixed-up thing you come up with, you can think in terms of "reskinning" it, like maybe the big-eyed, bird-legged, crab-clawed thing is slimy all over like an amphibian or entirely in armor plating like an arthropod!
Simple "scary guy with thing for head" designs can be very fun too though, I use a lot of them in my webcomic, but I like to change the rest of the body too, like making all the other proportions weird in some way, and I like to think about how that would actually interplay with their head, too. Like if a humanoid monster's head is one giant mechanical eyeball how does it really get around and use that eyeball to take in data? Maybe its arms and legs would be bent weird and elongated so it can scurry and climb rapidly. For Awful Hospital I gave the syringe-headed doctor a long retractable neck and huge stretched out hands for grabbing and jabbing :)
Can I just say you might be one of my most favourite artists of monsters I've seen on the internet. Like I looked at your deviantart and liked a few of the monsters I've seen, but holy shit, I went to your website and looked at Mortasheen and I unironically saw monster designs I thought were impossible, have never seen anything like, or couldn't be done. also your color palette is amazing, it's like I've dropped a tab of acid mixed with LSD. this mostly has absolutely nothing to do with the first comment I left, just looked at your website of monsters and found my new favourite visual artist. also thank you for taking the time to respond to my comment, It's fairly generic in the grand scheme of questions you probably get asked but I'm glad you replied.
I'm sorry I missed this comment for so long, I come on DA so rarely! Thank you so much, some people aren't big on my color palette or design style but I like it the way it is myself! It feels weird but nice when people say this kind of stuff because I'm still striving to be more like so many other artists I admire.