Creature Design - Ice Tiger
Lead artist intern at Fabula Studios
Creating the icemonster
During my internship I had to create a ice monster for the upcoming game Glacier. Here I had to work together with the Game Director Morten Brunbjerg, I had pretty free range and they were in need of visuals- so in the start, I had to pull from my imagination. The only prompt I got, was that it was supposed to be some kind of beast.
First I did 12 simply variations of silhouettes of the facial features of the monster, and asked for which features the Game Director preferred. After choosing 6 different designs, I continued on with concepting. Here I needed to add a more monstrous, corrupt and alien vibe to them, such as exposing their skin, adding more eyes, tentacles, tongues etc.
The Top 4
After choosing the favorite designs, I got told to add more of a tiger, lion, jaguar element. And of course this needed to feel more etheral, therefore adding effects such as shadowy mists and glowing elements will help create the effect.
The final 4?
In the previous image we chose to continue with the on from the second row to the left. The tiger look- but it needed more frost. By changing the tigers spikes and giving some of the lims a more ice aesthetic. Also giving the tiger to give off and ice effect either coming coming from the spikes, or the paws.
But sadly the Game Director wasn't happy with the results so we needed to return to the drawing board. Instead of focusing on the face solely, we began to focus on the body.
Midway sketches and body silhouettes
Returning to the jaguar, catty, alienish theme I went back to draw a lot of different silhouettes of the ice tiger. Here we wanted the tiger to become more thin and have even more alien incorporated. I tried to gett inspired by the skeletons of birds and anatomy of spiders
Though in the middle of all the silhouette creating, I did some off mind doodles. These doodles where more alien and mystic, so it wasn't on terms with the ice theme.
When choosing the designs, spike and textured where the ones surfacing up.
Figuring it out
We ended up getting inspired by one of the face silhouettes I did as a sketch, which kept the alien theme we were going with. Next up was that the body needed to be covered with pelt and needed to be exaggerated to look more thin.Â
How the concept worked
These were the 3 final concepts of the ice tiger. It is the ice moving with the dead tiger as its host,. The ice have emotions, so when hunting the ice camouflages itself, but when angry it would spike up and attack the player. Underneath you have the final detailed concept of the ice tiger.
Final concept