Week 06 - Tentacle Creature Assignment

This week's assignment was to design a creature with tentacles.

I began, as usual, by doing some research. I looked for interesting designs and pictures that might help me. There was a huge range of different tentacle creatures and was having a hard time finding just one type to stick with. I searched for the meaning of tentacles so that I knew what really classified and would be considered as tentacles so I knew what I was limited to.

I actually had a lot of trouble trying to come up with a design that I liked. I first tried the technique we learned for the crustacean creatures and start with silhouettes but as you can see above, I could not manage anything and kept giving up after a few tentacles.

I thought that sketching traditionally would be easier as that is what I'm more comfortable with but that actually turned out even worse.

I then remembered an art programme I had used before called Paint Tool SAI. It is not a professional programme but as I was having trouble making a rough, sleek silhouette with the hard brush in Photoshop I thought it was worth a shot. I opened a blank canvas and began with some sleek, smooth marks. The flow of SAI brushes made a huge difference and as you can see in the first image, I managed to think of a design.

I next went in to adding the detail in grey scale as I had done with the crustaceans. I then  added a layer of simple colours.

I don't really know how to do backgrounds so using a splatter brush to mimic water and an ocean texture set on a multiply layer, I added a block background.
I am relitively happy with my final design and feel I am finally getting the hang of painting digitally though I would like to learn how to add a simple yet effective background to my designs.