Mandatory rambling section before getting onto the actual post:
The beginning of the process was much like any other creative process for me – tons of thinking and writing beforehand. I swear, if I haven’t annoyed the tutors to death up till this point with how much I procrastinate by writing my ideas down instead of sketching or developing my concepts visually in general, I will have after this module. I really thought that I could move past this going onto second year but I feel like at this point, I should just embrace it as my own personal creative process as opposed to being so self-conscious of it. It truly is an irk that I should work on, but I found it to be quite helpful in terms of the bigger picture. Being on the course has granted me with the opportunity to be more analytical and conscious of how I work and function creatively. It’s just a matter of convincing everyone else that this is an efficient and valid way of working.. or is it? As long as I’m able to produce visual work eventually, it shall count for something. It’s now more of a matter of embracing the “wiggle” and staying true to myself as opposed to trying to mold a new creative persona. Editing is always delightful, of course, but I’d rather it came naturally as opposed to it being a conscious process, otherwise it feels forced.
With that out of the way, I can get onto writing out the actual post.
Before even getting onto creating the creature, I knew I wanted to go with a drag approach for answering the brief, which made a world’s difference and saved me a lot of time as I was able to use the silhouette of a human as my base for each design. What cemented it even further was the idea of going with the mental/emotional development of a person throughout stages of life as my key point of interest. Having drawn all that together, I felt confident going with an anthropomorphic approach. However, what awaited was far more complicated than I had anticipated..
I had quite a lot of things to consider before going forward with constructing a design for each stage:
- The developed personality and intelligence up till that point. Its sentience/consciousness, emotional and mental capabilities. A sub-point of this would be behaviours.
- Physical properties. Anatomy, muscle/bone development and how that affects the mobility/durability of the individual at that stage of life.
- Developped abilities, reflexes and instincts. With the development of sentience/consciousness come new abilities (ability to see, hear, talk, move, etc.) and behaviours that allow the individual to develop further.
- Correlations with other organisms in terms of all the aspects mentioned up until now. Finding the key organism(-s) to base the design around. Having my creature draw inspirations from already existing organisms makes it more believable of a speculation/hypothesis.
- Correlations with objects that the individual is exposed to in each stage.
- The relationship between different age groups and how that affects the development of each stage.
Robertas Tijusas 