Week 4

I'm a failure, I admit it. But here's week 4 anyway...the other work yet to come :D

"...one monster, a female named Leviathan in order to dwell in the abyss of the ocean over the fountains of water" 1 Enoch:7

Her humanoid form in Black Feather Gospel is that of a teenage girl, as Leviathan is said to be the demon of Envy. And we all know how envious teenage girls can get. and vicious. I always imagined her as a serpent-type monster, however, every time I tried to design her, I ended up unconsciously borrowing qualities from other peoples' leviathans designs instead of really trying to pull one together on my own.

So my mission today was to design a Leviathan. I've never been one for drawing animals, much less dragons, so it was a challenge.

after studying images of water dragons, here is the first sketch I came up with. I was happy with it until i realized it looked too similar to Haku from Spirited Away for my taste. http://images.absoluteanime.com/spirited_away/haku2.jpg

here is the first design:

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/ninnykins/Levi-Original.jpg

As you can see, I had a sort of Loch Ness meets Japanese Dragon thing going on. But I felt it was stiff and I didn't like the feel of it, I thought I'd like the wings but I really didn't. So I started looking up pictures of fish and settled on beta fish. Here's two doodles I did of betas. I didn't use color because I wanted to focus on the form of the fish instead of its priddy colors. Betas are so pretty, after all. The first one on the top left is more of a realistic study of a basic Crowntail-like beta. The one below is more of a stylized beta with a big ol' tail, probably teh biggest inspiration for Leviathan's final design. And then there's a quick doodle of Leviathan herself inspired by the music video "Michael (jump in)" by No more Kings (if you like catchy music or animation, check it out on youtube)

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/ninnykins/Fish-Studies.jpg

after looking at fishes, I dove into redrawing Leviathan. here is what I came up with. I like it a LOT more.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/ninnykins/Leviathan-Final.jpg

FInally content with myself. I decided to get into the mixed media portion of my assignment. I had a pack of synthetic feathers from Michaels, and a carousel of Copic markers. Curious, I started picking out feathers to color. The colors didn't bleed down the feathers' veins as well and I would have liked, but oh well. its all about trying new things.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/ninnykins/Favorite.jpg

This is my first attempt and my favorite. These are the types of colors I was thinking for leviathan, which got me to wondering if she would be a feathered dragon at all. that could be really cool, but seeing as she's a water dragon, I'm not sure how sensible that would be. However in Disney World recently I saw a bird come out of the water and bask in the sunshine for awhile to dry off its feathers. It stood there forever as I sipped my margarita and watched. Possible inspiration? Possibly. I'm not sure where to take it though.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/ninnykins/random.jpg

Here are two more I did, they somehow seemed to take the ink differently The first one was more of an intentional design and shape with the stripes and dots, i was thinking instead of a Leviathan Blue/Green scheme, Blue/purple could also be a possibility. I don't like it as much though, it seems much less Sea-like to me.

Beside it is the reject of the batch. Awhile ago, an acquaintance of mine designed a color who had a color scheme of Light Blue, Forest Green, and Orange. and it was uuuugly. I wanted to see if it would still be ugly if I did it. I think it is, personally.

Then I decided to see what would happen if I took a lighter to a faux feather. I was expected much awesomer results, but alas, being synthetic, it just curled and melted and charred. Woe. I was going to throw it away after I soaked the end in water, but then I decided to take some Olivey greens and browns to it instead to see if I could get a toxic, rotting effect. I think it turned out rather cool.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/ninnykins/Rotten_feather.jpg

so I'm going to keep the Blue/Green feather, and the rotten feather around for references for coloring feathers in the future. Feathers can be incredibly boring to color.



As a bonus, here is a cute picture of my dog Pip, or at least his nose.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a113/ninnykins/OHGOD.jpg