For this assignment we were tasked with making a Lava based creature concept, so to start as always I did research into what other artists came up with. A few things to note when designing a lava based creature which I was taught in lesson, and evidenced in other work, is that the hottest part of the lava or a fire is the centre where on the spectrum between Red and White, white would be in the core.
I liked the idea of my design being shrouded by the heat and smoke and that I would expand on it more as it is an idea that can be seen in other designs but is used more for effect rather than design.
I started off by designing a creature that would "pull" itself out of the lava, cooling the lava and hardening it around itself as it does to create a shell, but it would also be able to melt back into liquid lava to manipulate objects around it. Its main form of movement would be to seep back into its laval base and travel through the lava being able to bring itself back up at any point.
As a sketch it's not one of my best but I very much like the concept.
This I designed to be almost totally shrouded by the smoke it produced, I also wanted to make something more humanoid to give it a sense of intelligence. As a sketch I like this one, I used charcoal for the smoke mixed with pencil markings so as to produce this fluffy, lightweight feel to the sketch. I used the main muscles of the human chest and neck as a basis for the visible portions of his body, using a red pen marker and pencil sketches to create the feeling of the chest erupting and expanding with heat ad lava.
Again shrouded but not through its own creation, instead I used the environment/atmosphere to create the shroud, using charcoal and the red pen to emulate smoke and embers in the atmosphere. This design was influenced by laval golems and creatures that appear to hard a hard surface skin/texture but underneath are bubbling cauldrons of lava and heat, hence the use of red pen in the joints and cracks.
Finally this is my final design where I was able to use the painting of Photoshop to truly express the heat of the creature. the body is not visible but the silhouette is shown through the orange glow given off from the creatures back which houses an open pool of lava, which in turn gives off the glow and smoke (which would also be an orange hue due to the light from the lava). The only things I wanted to show through the creature was its core (the chest), mouth and eyes: all of which house an excessive amount of lava, as such I used lighter yellows for the colour but in hindsight I should have used lighter colours moving up towards white to emphasise the heat. However I do like the painting I did to show the smoke/heat given off by the mouth and chest, for which I used Filter > Other > Maximum.
Overall I am pleased with my final piece but I realise that there is room to improve and areas that I can improve on in this design that would help make the figure a bit more striking such as making the orange glow in the background a bit more vibrant to emphasis the silhouette.
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