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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.

Things started getting hectic from here on out. Things might look repetitive, and I guess to a point they were, but mostly I was obsessing over how those jaws interlocked and would open and close, as well as just how they would look. I also started obsessing a little bit over that infinity/figure-8 shape that's kind of going on with Sednarah's horn and eye, which was a total accident...and then seeing that I was also kind of doing it with the gap between the jaws, so it's almost like a chain of loops. Again, total accident, but the moment I saw it, I wanted to keep it in, if I could. I also decided here to start experimenting with the neck and this idea that, while Sednarah doesn't have bones, much less a spinal column, maybe the neck and back of its carapace would mimic vertebrae ridges, etc., to give its overall design some more texture. I'm actually worried though that if I keep indulging those feelings that Sednarah is going to get over-designed, and it's already kind of tempting fate as it is. I might have to go and simplify things AGAIN, even though I think these sketches are proving to be very fruitful in my desire to "complicate" the design a little.

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.

Things started getting hectic from here on out. Things might look repetitive, and I guess to a point they were, but mostly I was obsessing over how those jaws interlocked and would open and close, as well as just how they would look. I also started obsessing a little bit over that infinity/figure-8 shape that's kind of going on with Sednarah's horn and eye, which was a total accident...and then seeing that I was also kind of doing it with the gap between the jaws, so it's almost like a chain of loops. Again, total accident, but the moment I saw it, I wanted to keep it in, if I could. I also decided here to start experimenting with the neck and this idea that, while Sednarah doesn't have bones, much less a spinal column, maybe the neck and back of its carapace would mimic vertebrae ridges, etc., to give its overall design some more texture. I'm actually worried though that if I keep indulging those feelings that Sednarah is going to get over-designed, and it's already kind of tempting fate as it is. I might have to go and simplify things AGAIN, even though I think these sketches are proving to be very fruitful in my desire to "complicate" the design a little.

More to come.