In my previous blog post, I shared a new illustration of a creature known in Dungeons and Dragons as an Aboleth. However, I reworked the design to be more Lovecraftian and listed out my intentions to sculpt it and create my own miniature of it.
Here, I share with you my concept sketches that lead me to that design.
Lets start with my brief. Why design an aboleth in the first place? Well, in the D&D campaign I'm running, the aboleths are an important entity in the lore of the world setting and I don't have a miniature I felt worked with the Lovecraftian cosmic horror theme I was injecting into the setting.
So my brief is to design a lovecraftian inspired aboleth, that I'll need to sculpt and cast so I can have a painted miniature for my table (you know, in case my players ever run into an aboleth that is).
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| Silhouette Designs for the Elder Evil. |
I did a fair number of silhouette designs and incredibly rough scribbles in my sketch book to first find a body shape, pose, and just to get the creative juices going. Above are just a few of the ones I was drawn to. The idea of a mini where this fish like aberration was dragging its heavy body about on land, on two boney arms, really interested me.
After this I begun to explore some rough sketches for the body with some more detail:
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| Done in my sketch book with inks, this was the first look at what could be the aboleth. But I wasn't going to settle on the first design! |
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Done on a bigger piece of paper in another sketchbook, I refined some elements and did some suggestions of detail and texture. Again, not going to settle on the second design, I felt it was time to explore key parts of the design and try a number of variations (namely the head).
I did this head sketch in my sketchbook, but turned to Procreate to get through more designs in less time. I love drawing in my sketchbook, but I needed to churn through ideas quickly at this stage. |
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| The first small batch of head focused designs. Trying out different tentacle arrangements, different eyes, and different head shapes. I posted this to instagram to canvas some feelings from people to see what most creeped people out. |
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| Based on suggestions and input, I mixed it up and did more design work to try out some different ideas. In the end, design no. 9 was chosen to take forward because the position of the tentacles gave off a feeling it was hiding something (and thus unsettling), and the eye placement which is also iconic to the 'aboleth' creature itself. |
Concept design in about conveying information, and now I needed to create some work (mainly for me) so I could understand the form of the beast. This next drawing is a lite contour rough that I drew for me when it came to actually sculpting the model in clay. In the industry concept designers need to provide technical turnarounds for 3D artists to build from. I didn't want to get bogged down in details here for my project, nor spend too much time fussing about front, back and sides (yet), but I did want something that explained to me what was going on with the body. This also helps me plan how I'll go about making the model.
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| Some elements of the design were still not finalised, but from this drawing I could see the tubular shape of the body (which is like a moray eel) and also how the head was going to be shaped. Adding the tentacles wasn't super important in this drawing because I knew that when I came to sculpt them I'd probably experiment with the gestures anyway. |
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| After exploring some textures by doing some texture studies, I felt inspired to sketch out a culmination of the design work into something nearing a final design. In this sketch I changed the pectoral finns to be less wing like, and more humpback whale in design. I found some worn rock references and suggests that its skin would be made up of these sorts on indents (which will be super fun to sculpt!). |
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| This was initially a colour concept, which was going to act as a painting guide for when I eventually came to paint my physical miniature after I did the hard work of sculpting and casting it. But I wanted to push the paint job just a little further and make it a print. |
At the time of writing this, I'd only really just begun to play with clay and absorb sculpting tutorials. There might be a gap of time before now and the next post relating to this design but hopefully not. Feeling very inspired by this project and I'm keen to keep rolling with it.
Thanks for stopping by. If you would like to support my work, please share to social media, leave a comment, or if you want, grab a print of this Elder Evil from my Redbubble shop.
Until next time... stay out of the water!
Lloyd Harvey
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