More monster scribbles from the Alpha Omega vault

Here’s the batch of the next 20 beasties… more fast scribbles from the early design stages of The Encountered.

Enjoy!

My names I gave to these guys: Colonial Pygmy, Sasquatch, Screecher, Handstand, Chitin, Snot Lizard, Devo (get it?  He has whips for arms… whip it?  Whip it good?), Multicorn, The Sky Whale, Pyrosaur, BrainWorm, Webster A, Hooks, Ironclad, Underbite, Giant Rat (original, I know), Patchwork Crawler, Duct Wyrm, Greenman, CyberNaga and Webster B.

Hooray for lifted NDAs!

So  a major project that I was involved in has been released, so I am finally able to share some of my sketches here on the blog.    So that’s one Non-Disclosure Agreement lifted, 100 to go.  But there are a lot of sketches from this gig, so it should keep this blog a little livelier for a little while at least. The project was a monster booked called Alpha Omega: The Encountered by Mind Storm Labs, it’s just under 300 pages completely covered in illustrations and concept art.  I was involved with the illustrations to a lesser extent than I was with the Alpha Omega Core Rulebook but I designed somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 creatures (not counting the thousands of thumbnail sketches that will never see the light of day), many of which got the full ortho treatment… so it was a fairly involved undertaking.  Definitely drop by www.mindstormlabs.com and check out the previews and quickstart rules and maybe pick up a hardcopy… even if you’re not into roleplaying games they’re really beautiful art books. 

I’ve worked with the Mind Storm Labs team quite a bit so I have a pretty good sense of what they’re looking for – as a result I do a lot of self-editing at the thumbnail stage.  Since we (the team) are scattered all across the world all, work has to be digital (or scanned) and then e-mailed out to everyone… which gets to be cumbersome if you’re dealing with pages upon pages of barely legible scribbles.  So I only digitize the ’second tier’ sketches that make sense without an explanation or a two-hour skype conversation to wade through shape and silhouette decisions.

What I’m going to do is give you a fairly comprehensive look at the creature sketches that were submitted for review.  I’m going to publish in batches of 20 or so.  Keep in mind that most of these kind of suck, but they only exist to communicate ideas… not to put in an “Art Of” book.  So keep an eye out, or subscribe to the RSS, and you’ll get to check out a whole lot of stuff that you normally wouldn’t get to see (probably with good reason…).  So enjoy!

Here are the first 20ish scribbles.  We were still deciding what types of bizarre creatures would be explored in the book, so the first bunch were the ’safe’ ideas… you’ll see that the ideas got increasingly wierd as we went on.

I’ll include the placeholder names I gave them because it may give some insight into what I was thinking when I scribbled them out.  These guys are:   The Blister Cow, Mongoyle (Mongrel Gargoyle), Striped Ape (2 variations), The Uber Wolf (2 variations), The Snatcher, an Eel Otter, Ursid Behemoth, Spiny Simian, Bone Dog (it’s skin oozes fluid that hardens into chitinous pretective patches), the Colonial Reaver, Ursidial Lion (a bear variant built for ambushing larger prey), Redcap (rough and refined versions), a Pale Strider, the “Cheshire Cat”, Murder Slug, Blank (because I couldn’t think of an actual name…), Fluke, Stinky, Cephalofreak, and a Colonial Drone.