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Description

I once swore I might never return to this kaiju. Yet here we are.

A little bit of an explanation:

For those who don't know, the short version is that I designed this kaiju on the fly for an original kaiju contest that Matt Frank was holding. Yes, THAT Matt Frank. And I was lucky enough to have won (I think I won first place, but I definitely made top 3, he'll have to correct me if I'm wrong). In any case, Sednarah (Sentient Extraterrestrial DNA Replicator and Harvester) had a little swell of a moment here on DeviantArt, a little drop in the bucket, and then I basically went onto other things. It was a nice moment in my life as an artist and a kaiju fan to have brushed shoulders, kind of, with a guy who is now living the dream of drawing Godzilla for a living. Plus I never win anything really.

Life happened, and I basically just got busy with other things. Some bad, some really bad, all of it really distracting (ADHD sucks). I did a redesign of him a few years later that I actually really like, but...it never quite nailed what I was going for with this kaiju. Mostly, I wanted it to feel like it was made from spun glass, like a glass sculpture you see sometimes in museums (or thrift shops). It's never quite evoked that because my artistic abilities just aren't there. Plus, I always felt like Sednarah's design was overly simple. That's a positive in design, really, but it didn't really capture what I was going for either. So...being the glutton for punishment that I am...I decided to go back and try again.

I've been looking into a lot of different influences and inspirations. Glass sculpture, obviously, but also lots of interesting things like transparent animals, and microorganisms, cell-structures (which inspired the backstory for the kaiju too, all those years ago)...but while all of those were useful, none of them were really getting the juices flowing.

Then, of all things...I stumbled onto skulls. Bones. Skeletons. Google Image Search takes you weird places sometimes. And I realized what I might have been missing all of this time. The intricacies of how skeletons fit together, the sort of strange fragility they have in appearance but the amazing resilience they tend to have in function and practice...the way some skull bones are all ridges and dips and jutting protrusions and interlocking hooks and grooves and such...imagining all of those things like resin or glass or crystal really got me sketching.

This is the next sketch I did after the first (although admittedly I did skip around from sheet to sheet, so the design process is chronologically all over the place). I was really trying to figure out how to bring out the blown- or spun-glass look, intricacy, delicacy, flourishes, etc. I still really like the top tow ideas, but I'm wondering if it's TOO much. Those two did really get me to obsessing over how the jaws would work, though. Originally I wanted to really make the "bone look" work as practically and accurately as possible, but then I realized that's not really something I have to do if I don't want to. It also doesn't make sense to the character itself, pragmatically or rationally or lore-wise. Without going into it too much, Sednarah's outward appearance isn't really about evolutionary rationale, but more about expression, weirdly, and how the kaiju "wants to look." So that convinced me to play with this idea that the different pieces of Sednarah's body (which are less different pieces than they are part of a giant cohesive whole) aren't really thought of as different bones, or muscle groups, etc., but clearly it takes "inspiration" from all of those things, and the kaiju's hard cell-wall armor simply blends a bunch of different things together into a whole that makes sense for it. It's art, if the canvas were your own cellular structure. It's a long story, I might tell it someday. Again.

I'm actually gravitating more toward the one at the bottom right. Maybe not that one specifically, but that struck me as being more what I wanted. Sleek silhouette, but kind of a complicated, faceted look the enclosed within it. I will probably do two or three different "final designs," though, attempting to do different things and "say" different things through their designs.

More to come.

Description

I once swore I might never return to this kaiju. Yet here we are.

A little bit of an explanation:

For those who don't know, the short version is that I designed this kaiju on the fly for an original kaiju contest that Matt Frank was holding. Yes, THAT Matt Frank. And I was lucky enough to have won (I think I won first place, but I definitely made top 3, he'll have to correct me if I'm wrong). In any case, Sednarah (Sentient Extraterrestrial DNA Replicator and Harvester) had a little swell of a moment here on DeviantArt, a little drop in the bucket, and then I basically went onto other things. It was a nice moment in my life as an artist and a kaiju fan to have brushed shoulders, kind of, with a guy who is now living the dream of drawing Godzilla for a living. Plus I never win anything really.

Life happened, and I basically just got busy with other things. Some bad, some really bad, all of it really distracting (ADHD sucks). I did a redesign of him a few years later that I actually really like, but...it never quite nailed what I was going for with this kaiju. Mostly, I wanted it to feel like it was made from spun glass, like a glass sculpture you see sometimes in museums (or thrift shops). It's never quite evoked that because my artistic abilities just aren't there. Plus, I always felt like Sednarah's design was overly simple. That's a positive in design, really, but it didn't really capture what I was going for either. So...being the glutton for punishment that I am...I decided to go back and try again.

I've been looking into a lot of different influences and inspirations. Glass sculpture, obviously, but also lots of interesting things like transparent animals, and microorganisms, cell-structures (which inspired the backstory for the kaiju too, all those years ago)...but while all of those were useful, none of them were really getting the juices flowing.

Then, of all things...I stumbled onto skulls. Bones. Skeletons. Google Image Search takes you weird places sometimes. And I realized what I might have been missing all of this time. The intricacies of how skeletons fit together, the sort of strange fragility they have in appearance but the amazing resilience they tend to have in function and practice...the way some skull bones are all ridges and dips and jutting protrusions and interlocking hooks and grooves and such...imagining all of those things like resin or glass or crystal really got me sketching.

This is the next sketch I did after the first (although admittedly I did skip around from sheet to sheet, so the design process is chronologically all over the place). I was really trying to figure out how to bring out the blown- or spun-glass look, intricacy, delicacy, flourishes, etc. I still really like the top tow ideas, but I'm wondering if it's TOO much. Those two did really get me to obsessing over how the jaws would work, though. Originally I wanted to really make the "bone look" work as practically and accurately as possible, but then I realized that's not really something I have to do if I don't want to. It also doesn't make sense to the character itself, pragmatically or rationally or lore-wise. Without going into it too much, Sednarah's outward appearance isn't really about evolutionary rationale, but more about expression, weirdly, and how the kaiju "wants to look." So that convinced me to play with this idea that the different pieces of Sednarah's body (which are less different pieces than they are part of a giant cohesive whole) aren't really thought of as different bones, or muscle groups, etc., but clearly it takes "inspiration" from all of those things, and the kaiju's hard cell-wall armor simply blends a bunch of different things together into a whole that makes sense for it. It's art, if the canvas were your own cellular structure. It's a long story, I might tell it someday. Again.

I'm actually gravitating more toward the one at the bottom right. Maybe not that one specifically, but that struck me as being more what I wanted. Sleek silhouette, but kind of a complicated, faceted look the enclosed within it. I will probably do two or three different "final designs," though, attempting to do different things and "say" different things through their designs.

More to come.