Creature Concept (Critiques welcomed)

[CybrGfx]

You need to resize your image. It's too big, and people have to scroll to see it all.

The anatomy of this creature has some severe problems. Did you have any type of reference images to go by, or is this all out of your head?

While it has a very loose relationship to a wolf, the adaptations you have added make no visual nor evolutionary sense, and honestly, are somewhat poorly rendered.

The legs are poorly rendered, and are too short, with the joints too close to the ground.
The foot pads are too long, and the oversized claws very contrived and silly looking. They would not be of much use in running, fighting, or attacking...
The curly addax horns, like the silly oversized claws, make no visual sense, in that they would impede this creature terribly in the pursuit of game. For an herbivore, speed and maneuverability is not that big of an issue to secure food, for a carnivore, such as this one, those horns would do nothing but get in the way...
It doesn't appear to have any ears, since the horns are where the ears should be...
The neck is too short, and too thin to support the head with those horns.
The muzzle as you've drawn it is too short for the mouth, which is too small for the head.

Also, just from a general rendering viewpoint, you do not have a consistent light source, with your shadows and highlights all over the place, and your background is too indistinct, with the strange marbling on the ground looking attached to the creature's feet...

Do a Google Image Search for "Gray Wolf," since that is the closest type of real animal to this creature, and look at the proportions and musculature.
You also might want to check out this link (http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=107182) for some guidelines on creature anatomy.

Basically, you need to have some sort of justification for the physical anatomy you create.
What environment does this creature live in?
What ground conditions does it travel on? How fast can it move?
What type of food does it eat, and how does it acquire it?
What is the purpose behind such oversized and bulky claws, and such unwieldy and unbalancing horns?

I'm sorry, but this creature just doesn't make much sense to my eye, and so it is hard to appreciate all the time you put into detailing and painting it (which appears to be considerable), when it just ends up looking somewhat nonsensical.

Better to put the time in before rendering by thinking about what you are going to create. This looks like you started off without much of a clear idea of what you were going to create, and you just added things as you thought of them..."Oooh, some giant claws, yeah!" "And I'll give it those weird, long, curly horns like that antelope in Africa, kewl!"

The coloring is pretty good, and the marbling/webby effect (when it is not attached to the feet of the creature), would make an awesome background or texture in another piece...Did you paint that by hand, or use a custom brush? It is a GOOD effect,it just doesn't go well with this piece.

Probably not exactly what you wanted in a critique, but I'm somewhat picky, visually. I like my imagination to be able to accept strange creatures as having some viable reality to them, and this guy just looks like some Taxidermist's plaything.

~Cyber

[Spider07]

Hey Cyber,


I use some reference but most of it was out of my head. Thank you for the critique. No need to be sorry, it was what I need to hear as an artist, this is why a wanted some feedback. I did this piece prior to the animal anatomy and creature design class that I am taking now. I should have did a lot more thinking about the story of this creature and how it was going to look before jumping straight into the final design. Sometime in the future I will have a revisit this creature and flesh him out better.

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.