I’ve mentioned before here that I love drawing competitions. One in particular that I try to always enter is Sketch Theatre’s monthly sketch competition. I highly recommend it. You can win gnomon videos if you end up in the top 4! July’s competition should start any day now: Sketch Theatre!
June’s competition was to sketch up a “Behemoth”! I loved this one. The description was: “So this month your job is to design a Behemoth, aka a large lumbering character or creature. This bipedal muscular beast should be around 10-15 feet tall, similar to how Trolls are often represented. The design stray from trolls, however, as long as the character feels large and menacing!”
Sounds pretty cool huh! I immediately started some tiny doodles…
1) Just a warm-up. Had to get the more expected types of designs out of my system first.
2) Thought about the menacing part on this guy. I had the image that instead of hands, the bones of his forearms grew out into thick claws.
3) Went for creepy, but it ended up comical as well.
4) Yeah, supposed to be 2 legs…whoops.
5) Another creepy-ish type of idea. But as you can see, he would be way over 10-15 feet tall if those birds were hawks or eagles or gulls….what the heck kind of birds are those? lol
6) I liked this one. Had a Frankenstein’s monster feel to it.
7) A big husky, furry… nah.
8) Another odd one. Big, fat, but tiny arms.
9) Went down an alien creature route with this one.
10) And this guy has an old 50’s monster movie feel to him.
Ran out of room on this page, so onto another. And on this page, I made the designs a bit larger as I was loosening up now:
11) I really liked this one. The gigantic arms that curled around him with the brahma bull hump. The legs – too small and look silly so they gotta change.
12) Still wanted to try a few other ideas. This one was a big bruiser from head to toe. And I wanted to give him some fat as something different. But, I still like #11 better.
12) One last idea. This more alien-ish version uses his arms to walk around on as his legs have become useless because of some strange evolutionary direction. An interesting idea (maybe I’ll use it in the future on another design), but #11 is the winner!
The head in the corner? Just had to fill up the paper. 🙂
Now it’s onto the final design. I actually sketched out 3 or 4 larger versions of #11, but none of them had the same energy as that original tiny sketch. It happens. Sometimes that first little doodle has more life to it than the final version that took hours. Go figure. My solution was to blow up the doodle and use it as a base for the final. Turned out pretty good. Still had to fix the legs – went a gorilla route there.
For the final drawing, I added a touch of humor. – In my piece, we have 3 Bigfoot enthusiasts who crept up upon the behomoth thinking they had found Bigfoot only to be unpleasantly surprised. The guy with the camera fainted, the one with the Bigfoot flyers ran in terror, and the hippie with the “I love Bigfoot” sign is ready to pee his pants. All the while, the Behomoth stands there puzzled.
Lot of fun to work on and I’m looking forward to July’s challenge. I’m also working on some new creature redesigns as I got such a good response from the Critter redesigns.
More to come!
Josh Hagen 