Hello! do you have any tips on how you do your character/creature designs? I love all your designs so much their all so cool especially your jackalope/rabbit oc! Love them^^ I would love to hear how you come up with the designs! (I’m planning to make a game and big spooky animal creatures are a big aspect n I wanna do it as best as I can so uh yeah like I said you got any tips?👀✨)

I have been making a BUNCH of tutorials and tips about this and many other topics so check them out!

Yeah! My biggest tip is understanding Splice vs Blend techniques, <- I go into a LOT of detail on getting a cohesive creature here.

It's pretty clear visually here, but splicing is cutting and pasting animal parts together with no or minimum blending at the edges. Classic and real life genetic chimeras are splices of two organisms, and their boundary is very clear. It looks really unnatural. Hybrid animals and mixed breeds shuffle traits all over, so learn from nature to make things natural.

and then consider what traits you add and ask "how did this manage to evolve?" why do they have glowing eyes? Is it for communication? intimidation? warning of poison content?

What adaptions did they develop to best take advantage of their niche/biome? What was the process like? What did the intermediate stages look like and how did they function?

Make something cohesive, give thought to "how is it going to hold up its own weight?" how does it fight? Even rabbits have tools for fighting, and they're built for running and fleeing above all else.

How does it communicate? How would its body adapt to that?

These are all important aspects of Worldbuilding

Don't forget that animals will have instincts and behaviors, while sentient creatures will have Culture. A HUGE thing I see is people giving sentient creatures normal paws but somehow using and building tools? You gotta adapt that sort of stuff dude. They dont needs hands if you can come up with an alternate method of fine motor skills (prehensile trunk, tail, tentacles, weird teeth, an extra set of limbs just for manipulating things, etc) if your creature physically cannot hold and build a knife, they have no business wielding it.

If you cant draw them crafting something, don't draw them using it unless they got it from someone else.

But don't get too carried away with fancy digits you forget the primary purpose of limbs: locomotion and weight bearing.

Here is an unfortunate dragon where I picked my favorite traits and put them together. I also added vestigial arms for some reason and now I have to explain why they're like that. The same goes for any other Just Cause trait you wanna slap on. His name is Dinkus

he's got some problems and you can kinda feel it just looking at him, but it will help you way more to name them. Every part of your creature should influence every other part. A horse has a strong neck and strong haunches because its a domino effect. Let's make this guy hefty

Though a biped would be Possible, it would just look like a t-rex, so I brought the wings down and reverted them to load-bearing legs. But because they used to be wings with long fingers, I'm having her walk on her knuckles because shortening the bat fingers takes a Long time and if evolution finds a shortcut, it will exploit it. But that's a flightless creature so is it really a dragon?

There's dinkus turned in the other direction. I wanted them to fly and so all their adaptions are for that. I also wanted that funky head and made up a reason for it to be that way. You might automatically have this small dragon hunting lizards and rats and such, but if you consider their physiology for a moment, their diet, you just expanded your world and filled out the vulture niche without even trying.

BE CAREFUL THOUGH!

While you cant worldbuild too much, you can infodump too much. So once you have everything built, you need to ask yourself what is appropriate for your project. If it's a dramatic story, you do not need to pause the battle to describe how the buzzard-dragons that are waiting to feast evolved. Just show them off, in writing or visually, and let the audience infer how they evolved and what their behavior is like form their anatomy.

Some people (me) want to engage in the worldbuilding details and get into the nitty gritty of biology/textiles/trade/politics/culture/etc but most audiences are here to be entertained. If you have dragons instead of vultures, a few people will go THAT'S SO COOL but most of them won't even notice... consciously.

Worldbuilding makes a world more believable and immersive. By having dragons eat the dead of war, you remind the reader that this is Not earth, but rather a place that is so whole and complete you know who is going to clean up the roadkilled jackalope stinking up the cobblestone.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuutt....

If you want to create a national geographic journal (which is what I'm doing) and your audience wants it too? (or if you dont care what your audience wants you do this for YOU) Go for it! roll around in details. daydream and doodle new ones. Go crazy go stupid go have fun

OH YEAH! And the biggest tip of all is study nature!

Try to guess what developed and why. How stuff is used, and then you can turn around and put both form and function into your own creatures.

Almost forgot: I clean, document, photograph, and assemble animal skeletons/skulls as a hobby. soooooo that helps me study Real Good.

Play games, make up challenges, and then make it harder

Studying what exists is the best way to create what doesn't. Study work you like, study my work and see what choices I made and ask yourself "why did he use THAT trait?"

Speaking of my work

I believe that in a perfect world, knowledge, especially art knowledge, should be free.

But it's not a perfect world and sadly I need money, so if you found this useful please consider pledging to my patreon or kofi!