Tentacles

We were given an assignment in the previous lesson by Steve Brown. This assignment was to create a mood board of inspiration and research of our interpretation of what tentacles are. From this research we would then draw out several ideas of tentacles, just as a rough. We would then choose the one that we liked the most and carry it onto Photoshop. From here will would color and try to touch it up to become a realistic looking piece.

I'm quite worried about the task as I'm not a very quick sketcher, but I think this is why we have been doing the life drawing sessions, to not only get our skill up, but to get our speed up as well.

I've started off by creating the mood board. This contains everything that I believe to be inspiration on the subject of Tentacles. 

Everything that I believed to be inspirational.

There are many different images in the board that were what I thought when it came to Tentacles. As you can see, there are a lot of references to comic book characters such as Carnage and Venom from The Amazing Spider man and Jackie from The Darkness. I also have a fair few video game references such as Gears Of War, Fallout and Mass Effect.

I believe Tentacles to be something dark, something sinister. That's why most of the ones on my board aren't cute in any shape or form.

After this stage, I managed to create a mind map towards more specific classes of tentacles than just the mood board.

My tentacle mood board,

Next, I decided that I would create a list of all my favorite tentacles that I have ever seen, this way, i can determine what works well on a tentacle and what aspects I may include in  my ones.

Favorite tentacles part 1.

Favorite tentacles part 2.

I decided that the next step would be to draw several quick designs based on the ones that are in my mood board. These drawings will have a very limited amount of time spent on them as I want to show the development as I go along.

These are my two rough drawings.

As you can see I have crafted two rough version of creatures with Tentacles. One I call The Consumer, the other I call The Octo-Eye. By looking at them you can tell I have gathered various different sources of research and have tried to put them into my pieces.

With The Consumer, I tried to go for a humanoid Octopus. There used to be a whole race of his kind until hunting had sent them into oblivion, now as the last of his kind, The Consumer has taken it upon himself to end those who bought injustice on so many. At the end of his tentacles are spiky suction pads, which will fed him.

With The Octo-Eye, I tried to draw a clam with tentacles coming out of it, the result which I was very happy with, so I decided to add just one eye, to make him creepily stand out. These Octo-Eyes are the main sea creatures on a human colorized planet. They live at the very bottom of deepest oceans. The tentacles act as a defense mechanism, managing to fend off any attackers.

I decided that I would be taking the Octo-Eye to the next level. This means that I am going to be scanning this into Photoshop and will being using the skills that I learnt in the previous lessons to create a piece of concept art.

Heading towards the finish line.

Here is the result that I got when I finished coloring in my eye. As you can see I really liked the idea of having a traditional tentacles which were purple so I tried using quite a bit of that. Up to this point my favorite part so far is the eye as I modeled that off an actual fish eye. There is still some work to do though.

Final result 1.

Final result 2.

In the end I got two different results for the painting. As I wanted to show this creature coming out of the abyss, I experimented with Photoshop. These were the two results that I was happiest with. Though if I had to pick one it would have be the second image. I feel its because you can see the creature coming towards you more than you can in the other.  The shading and detail is a lot better as well.