Odopi

Odopii are legendary beings of chaos and evil from the Tarterian Depths of Carceri. A directionless bundle of twisted limbs, the Odopi moves constantly and inelegantly onward by rolling on its many hands, each with an ugly yellow eye in its palm. Their huge bodies can lay waste to cities in moments.

I wanted to try a more painterly style again with this one, I guess it's sort of like a cross between the Necronaut and Shivhad. What can I say, I love drawing bony arms.

Also he's supposed to be rampaging through the Clockwork Nirvana of Mechanus, another planar realm based on order and lawfulness. I might work some little robot men into it to get a better sense of scale.

NB - click on the image to see it full size, the colours got kinda messed up in the blogspot thumbnail.

Bulette

A Bulette, or land-shark, is a huge quadrupedal burrowing creature. Strong and mindless, Bulettes live simply to eat, and with such a massive body comes a notoriously resilient digestive sytem. Bulettes are true omnivores and will eat literally anything, including animals, plants, metals, even soil and rock if nothing else is available. Solitary creatures (except in certain terrifying situations where they reside with a mate) Bulettes are mercifully rare.

Back to routine! After posting the animations we're back to just static illustrations for a while (although keep your eye out for an animated .gif or something). Trying to go for a stylised Craig McCracken look here, whilst tipping my artsy hat to that other great land shark.

Frost Giant

The Frost Giant is a massive blue-skinned humanoid that makes its lair in icy caves. They live in groups, ruled by their wisest, strongest and most evil among them, called Jarl, and served by slaves snatched from raids.

Okay, I'm going to straight-up admit that I strayed a little from the desciption in the books, becaue the books essentially describe 15-foot tall blue Vikings. Not that Vikings are bad or anything, since the Frost Giant is based on the jotunn anyway, but I just wanted to do something a little different.

I feel all rested up now from doing that big animation for the last post. Maybe I'll start a new one.

Edit: Now with alternate colors. Does anybody have a favourite version?

Lizardfolk

The lizard-men are one of the staple creatures of fantasy, presented in D&D as the aptly-named Lizardfolk. They're a non-evil people, primitive but not savage, or at least that what the original Monster Manual indicates. Further books down the line give subraces/tribes of various lizardfolk, some with more evil abilities than other.

AND I'VE FINALLY FINISHED THIS ANIMATION WOOP

This was probably one of the more complicated characters I've animated to date. Other characters I did were a lot simpler, whereas with this one I always had to keep track of his belly ridges, number of teeth and so on.


Here, have some progress.

1) Turnaround of the monster, so I can always be aware of what details I'm missing, what proportions are wrong, what color goes where and so on. Drawn like three weeks ago.



2) Animating. Several step process because I can't just do it the smart way and not redraw the same shape a bazillion times.






Special thanks to Joe for showing me a whole lot of After Effects tips for improvements on the final render. Sounds on the film were taken from freesound and were originally created by Rhedcerulean and melarancida.

Rust Monster

I wouldn't say it's 100% finished but I have had pretty much the most-stressful-day-that-hasn't-involved-worrying-about-money-ever today, involving (least of all) my computer completely refusing to cooperate in any way imaginable so I'm just going to upload it as it is so I can stop being annoyed at it. So here it is, sans floor shadow and a coupla other things. Phooey! Phooey, I say! I will make it better and give it a formal uploading on vimeo or something later! Sorry to all you (doubtless by now both innumerable and disappointed) fans expecting more of me.

For those in the dark about Rust Monsters, all the necessary info can be found here. Goodnight!

Troglodyte

A bloodthirsty race of primitive lizard-men, Troglodytes are mostly found underground, where they live in small tribes. Rarely arming themselves with anything more sophisticated than a simple spear or javelin, Troglodytes have nonetheless evolved some interesting features for protection - most famously, they are capable of excreting a scent through pores in their skin which smells so awful it can disorientate and deter most non-troglodyte foes.

STILL NO ANIMATION, ALTHOUGH YOU CAN HAVE A SNEAKY WORK-IN-PROGRESS PEEK IF YOU WANT:


INTERESTING, HUH? CHECK BACK NEXT WEEK. :3

Catoblepas and Gorgon

The Catoblepas and Gorgon are both classic monsters of the D&D beastiaries, but I have a special reason for drawing them both together; they're based on the same mythological creature, though one of them was given a different name.

Pliny the Elder and Bartholomeaeus Anglicus describe the Catoblepas as an Ethiopian bull-like creature with a long neck and head always kept low under the weight of its massive horns. Its vision is deadly. Some centuries later, Claudius Aelianus added that the creature had shaggy hair, a scaly back and poisonous breath. It's generally assumed that all these authors were referring to Africa's wilderbeest.

So this single monster was divided into two monsters: the extremely aggresive, metal-scaled Gorgon with petryfying breath, and a considerably more peaceful, long-necked Catoblepas with death vision.


Animations next week! Probably!