Lava Monsters/Beats/Golems (however you want to define them) Sketchbook Assignment

The sketchbook assignment this time was to design a sort of golem or beast which has cracks revealing lava within, a pretty cool assignment overall and keying in with the lesson assignment of how to do lava well, plus its nice to do something a little bit magical or fantasy themed after a few weeks for homework.

And here is the moodboard i got together, love all the interesting shapes that people use in the designs (and indeed the rocks themselves) i looked for things that were rock or lava based creatures as well as things that used rock like textures or appearances (diablo from diablo and deathwing from warcraft for example)

alot of these have similar design trends to the big, bulky and more masculine shapes, so i had the though to maybe try and play around with some slight alteration to this (and to do some completely traditional stuff- hehe)

This is a pretty traditional design for this type of creature (it was also done as experimenting for designs for a boss in the group project im currently doing) but i still had a lot of fun doing it, there's alot of variation in how to use rocks to establish the shape of a humanoid. since he's meant to be a brute i made him quite hulking and hunched over to emphasize the bulk.

the bottom couple of doodles were even more fun cause i gave him more arms, which is pretty cool since you can make them cross their arms all cool like but also try and punch something, i also gave him multiple eyes (or at least eye shapes , probably filled with lava) i liked taking inspiration for how some of my moodboard images used jutting rock shapes to create interesting anatomy for the golem

I'm going to admit this full out, the original sketch of this had no research behind it, i sat down and doodled rock shapes and this is what came out, when i used some pen to overlay it i did influence it a bit from my moodboard content, aspects like a greater emphasis on the chest insets, and the outcropping rocks on things like the arm and headpiece. i went into this one thinking about not going for a ridiculous amount of bulk, but still be sturdy. i also liked going for a fractured look, as though it was a construct that could only find so much material to compose itself.

also i have to draw attention to how i got the waist area to have this mouth like combination of rocks which is seriously cool looking, i can really get down with the rule of cool for designs like this. as for the magma it would be coarsing through to keep the upper and lower halves together.

And here are my final couple of sketch pieces (final coloured piece to follow) both of which are just alternate forms of eachother. The bottom picture is my beast who i have named "fractured earth" i went for a much more bestial design here, as opposed to my previous designs that followed a rough humanoid shape. i wanted this thing to truly come across as a force of nature, just this colossal titan. 

For instance his arms are embedded in giant shards of mountain, which leak remnant lava, and the back is covered in giant stone swords from time ago, and his whole body can be attributed to being made from huge amounts of stone. the lava core while hidden in the bottom picture is in the center of the body and flows through the body. i also wanted to cover the face with a mask, or the mask is the face because i wanted to not have any human elements to reduce the empathy (not sure if this is the right word) that someone would feel from looking at it.

The above is a somewhat humanised form of that titan (with slight modifications to make it work in human shape) as i wanted to experiment with producing a more feminine shape from rock and lava (the core is more apparent here) .

(insert final piece here)

In reflection i had a lot of fun here, and i think i can say i came up with some varied designs that at least slightly changed the common attributes of this type of monster. but i could have better emphasized the lava throughout the design as i got caught up in the rock element of these monsters. additionally i can say that i wished i slightly better planned out the 3D posing of my designs as trying to paint these revealed how they actually could have the posing changed for the better (the alt design in particular i should have gone for a more hunched pose to give it a bestial feel.