To the public: this is an example of a Process Gallery for one of my creature designs, a type of content I typically reserve for Patrons Only. I've chosen to make this one public, due to the nature of the motivations behind its creation, so that I can share it with more people. Additionally, it also gives you an idea of what it is I like to share with my Patrons on this page, in case you were considering becoming one.
Design Background
My dog and best-friend-baby-girl, Duckie, had an emergency appointment with the vet scheduled earlier this week (6/30/2020, I think). She's had a very slow-growing lipoma on her leg for most of her life, which I had resolved to have removed soon regardless. In a matter of a couple of days, it had suddenly grown huge and undergone a texture change; I ran her to the vet as soon as they could get me in. They did their tests, and the vet said that he saw cancer. We scheduled the tumor removal (two of them; a mysterious tiny one had popped up recently as well), and he got everything that he could see. We're still waiting on the official results from the histopath, but Duckie is recovering well (outside of having to be run to the emergency vet for reopening her larger incision). To try to raise some money to help mitigate costs (current and ongoing), I resolved to create and sell this design.
There have been a multitude of stressors both wordly and just within my own world outside of this, especially this past week. I don't care to dive into those (my car broke down right before I had to pick her up from surgery, for example), but I have sort of gathered all of these things up and wrapped them up as inspiration to make this critter.
Elements of the Design
For reference sake, I've called this design 'Growth'. Growth was heavily inspired by my dog and the ongoing situation. Its body-type is the same as Duck's, but with extremely exaggerated shapes (she's a noodly thing). It even has her weird rear dewclaws which I've mirrored the claws of on the front and the wing tips. She's a white dog with brindle spots, the largest of which are over her eyes and ears, and at the base of her tail. Everywhere else is mostly small ticking. Where these markings are, I've painted shelf-fungus, an idea pulled from de-stressing with The Last of Us: Part II as I camp out on the couch to keep an eye on her. The hair is where her fur is thickest, but nowhere else (except the tail tip to tie it together) because my brain was in a dark place thinking about cancer and hair-loss when I made that choice. Growth's throat is droopy and covered in loose, holey skin because Duckie has loose, stretchy neck-rolls that were flopping out of her e-collar (and lookin' real funny). Finally there's the wounds at the incision sites, and the rusted manacle where she was shaved for an IV. I did a little bit of experimentation with colors. A lot of my work is typically more colorful, but this time, color seemed to detract from it; I kept it fleshy instead.
I wanted to produce a design that already looked storied and had a degree of obvious pathology accompanying it to give it more character right out of the gate. Hopefully I was successful with that.