BSC2018 Connectamabob's suspicious frozen treat

[Connectamabob]

Placeholder thread. Still working on an idea. Have some loose notions, but still trying to resolve them into a proper idea.

[beefcake]

Love the title Look forward to whatever it is you will make. I'm sure it will be fun.

[Connectamabob]

So I think I've settled on a general concept.

It's a classic horror trope: someone finds something ominous yet fascinating frozen somewhere, and decides to dig it up, cart it back, and thaw it out. Usually in a fantastically incautious way, with no scientific rigors or quarantine protocols or anything. They just sort of park it in an ordinary unsecured room with the AC off, and wander away to let nature take it's course, sight unseen.

Relax: it'll be fine. That thump out in the hallway was just the pipes: you know how the plumbing is in these old buildings. And I'm sure that weird headache is just a bit of a cold coming on: always happens this time of year, amirite?

The most well known examples in pop culture are probably "The Thing"/"Who Goes There?" and its spiritual ancestor "At The Mountains of Madness", but it's shown up in so many forms, in so many movies, books, TV shows, comics etc. over the years. Sometimes an alien, sometimes a supernatural creature, or a prehistoric disease, or a cursed artifact, etc. Sometimes it's thawed out by "scientists", or sometimes religious nutters, or dumbass yokels/teens hoping for something they can sell or smoke.

Still considering the exact details, but the gist will be someone found a thing in the ice somewhere, and despite being able to CLEARLY SEE it's something creepy and exotic and ancient, they're still eagerly thawing it out in the most lazy, least cautious way possible.

*EDIT* On further thought, it'll definitely be a creature of some kind. Something exotic enough to immediately sell the idea that the normal rules of known terrestrial life cannot be trusted to apply (i.e. thawing it may not be safe), but not chaotic in the way that's the frequent (and often lazy, IMO) go-to with eldritch stuff. More Elder Thing or Ogdru-Hem than shoggoth or The Thing, if that means anything. It'll be a fun monster design challenge as much as anything else, and if I have the time and materials I might do more then one to suit different sizes, settings, and time periods.

[Hupp n at em]

This is an awesome concept, can't wait to see you get crackin on it. 

[Vanvlak]

I like trope models 

[tinfoilknight]

If you haven't seen the latest The Thing remake I recommend giving it a watch. The movies bland but the monster design is excellent. There's scenes of it moving quite rapidly and they give you a real "oh shit" sense of an alien creature. It's one of the best examples of monster movement I've seen.

If you could manage it would you be better off doing the iced scene rather than the monster waking up scene? Putting a monster under the ice with people and equipment working to dig it up would be cool as hell. That or parkly frozen so maybe it's tentacles are probing around as it's main body is still encased? Might be a bit too ambious although really awesome if it was done. Lots of water effects could be a problem.

[Connectamabob]

I haven't seen the prequel. I'm a huge fan of the JC film, and a lot of what I've heard/read/seen of the prequal rubs me very wrong in a wide variety of ways.

I actually kinda don't want to do The Thing specifically for this. I mean, I kinda do in a general sense, but more specifically I don't want to do a "random wad of tentacles and mouths" sort of monster. I want the fun of designing something that is that level of alien, yet is also visibly a coherent organism.

Also "lol so random" anatomy is something I see a lot in Cthulhu mythos art, and which I feel is one of the laziest ways of doing alien/eldrich creatures. It's basically only half a step up from simple animal chimeras. "The Thing" earns it with how the visual is a product of the awesome concept, rather than the concept being a lame apologetic for the visual, but with most stuff IMO it's just the artist being incredibly unimaginative.

My plan was already to show the creature fully imbedded in the ice. Either on-site, or in a block. I might do a partially thawed one, but only if the full embed doesn't work out. The "ill advised" part is contextual, so I will have to build some other stuff to imply a setting and context. That said, since this is a gaming-related build competion, I might want to do an "up and about" sculpt of the monster, for the part in the (hypothetical) scenario after it thaws.

You're spot on about the fussing with water effects being the most challenging part. I've been doing research since I announced my entry, trying to find a pourable material that is both clear enough AND non-yellowing. My hope was to find something cheap and common, so that my results would be repeatable by others regardless of location or budget, but I don't think I'll be able to meet that self imposed condition.

Finding pourable clear materials is easy. It's the non-yellowing part that isn't simple or cheap. My first thought was paraffin wax, but that stuff is too cloudy for embeds (makes great ice otherwise though). I went reading up on different clear resins, and am probably going to go with an epoxy called ArtResin. Clear polyurethane could work well, but it's notoriously fussy about ambient moisture and surface contaminates, and I have no prior experience with it (with opaque polyurathanes yes, but not clear): too easy to ruin the project acidentally. Likewise, clear polyester is ubiquitous and relatively cheap, but its non-yellowing status is unpredictable, and the catalysts have to be measured on a difficult-to-calculate sliding scale, and the material itself is caustic when wet, so possibly unpredictably bad for the paint on the creature.

Epoxies actually have the worst rep (and chemistry) for yellowing, but they are almost fool-proof to use, and this specific brand's entire schtick is very specifically designing formulas for non-yellowing.

I haven't made a purchase yet though, so suggestions are welcome.

[tinfoilknight]

It's more of a straight remake than a sequel but I can understand not wanting to tarnish the JC version. There's a good making of documentary which shows the creature off. I think it's different enough that it stands apart from the 80s version.

Completely agree with the chtululu thing. The Funko type non-sense you see every where is just terrible. They have completely wiped everything of Lovecraft out of that stuff and left with a squeaky clean octopus monster. It's pretty lame that way.

Recently I read a great article in Imagine fx magazine. In the 2017 Christmas issue they had an article on designing creatures. If you can track it down (I believe they have a digital version) you might find it useful. One of the best tips was drawing a bunch of different rough shapes and then seeing which was appealing. Then when you have it's basic outline go and develop that into a creature. Monster designings one of my pet projects and I had never looked at it that way before.

[Connectamabob]

Rather than the cutesy whimsical stuff, I was talking more about the tendancy for artists, when called apon to draw/sculpt something "Lovecraftian", to produce something that just looks like a randomized wad or snowball of tentacles and mouths and maybe eyes. No real anatomy, just the bio equivalent of a Bog cube. When pressed, they might defend this as "but, chaos!", or "structure is familiar, so no structure is ultimate alien!" as if that makes what they did any more imaginative or cool looking (never mind that the latter excuse is untrue at both ends).

The Funko type stuff is more what I've always thought of as "Martha Stewart Halloween". As a fan of scary stuff since I was a kid, I have always hated it as something akin to cultural appropriation. The cutesy whimsical stuff has more mass market appeal, so once that stuff gets its claws in, it's only a matter of time before the only version of scary thing X that pop culture is aware of is cutesy whimsical thing X, and so another touchstone is lost.

A similar thing happens to genre movie franchises. After the first 1 or 2 good, smart, scary films, the marketing department takes over production, and what was once a legit good thing becomes merely the first chapter in an increasingly stupid comedy/action series. Once this happens nobody remembers the smart stuff anymore, just the dumb stuff, which they will defend as the real thing and/or "more fun". I hate this because as I get older, it gets harder and harder to become a fan of something new and good, because I know that if it gets any notice, it WILL get turned into exactly the sort of rubbish it started out as an exeption to.

But enough of my yelling at clouds. I'm interested in the article you mentioned, but can't find it. I found the digital version of the 12/2017 issue of Imagine FX, but it didn't have an article like that. There was one page that talked VERY briefly about using primitive forms for emphasis in drawing cartoon charachters, and another page that very briefly talked anout using action lines in poses, but neither seems like what you were describing (and both are basic stuff you can find in any drawing book regardless, so it seemed weird to see them treated as special tricks in a magazine like this).

[Connectamabob]

First creature done after a week of not doing. Wish I could say I was too busy, but nope, just found myself oddly really not in the mood. Finally knuckled down on Friday night.







A pretty simple creature to start with. A giant humanoid planarian worm was sort of the concept. I wanted to make something that would be conspicuously humanoid. As in, we're used to not batting an eye at unrealistically humanoid creatures, so my self-imposed challenge was to try and design something that would subconsciously call attention to the wrongness of it being humanoid. Sort of an inverted uncanny valley effect. I don't really think that's possible, but I wanted to try anyway.

Started with a wee thumbnail sketch (48mm), then sculpted it in Bees Putty "summer firm", on a basswood block smoothed with Green Stuff. Once cured, It will be carefully cut/peeled off the block. Sketch was intended to be to scale, but the sculpt turned out a little taller at 52mm. No worries: this one doesn't need to be precise.

[Vanvlak]

That IS nice - for some reason he's reminding me of the Sorn, from C.S.Lewis' 'Out of the Silent Planet'. 

[Connectamabob]

Hmm, I can see that. I haven't read OotSP since I was a little kid, and don't remember the book's actual description, but the mental image of the Sorn I remember having back then looks sort of like a really huge and elongated version of the Whitley Strieber "Communion" aliens. If that's generally accurate, this could work as a more detailed and/or exotic interpretation of the same text, maybe?

I do remember a bit where the humans are described from the martian's POV as looking like stick figures made of sausages. I remember this giving me the strong impression that the martians could not recognize anything in the forms of human muscle and bone structure at all, so it all just looked like vague, randomly lumpy tubes to them. That made me think at the time that the martians' musculoskeletal anatomy must be really, REALLY different. So different that it must look equally vague and/or confusing to our eyes.

[Vanvlak]

Well if that's a Sorn - I like it! 

[Andym]

That is creepy.....and cracking!

Fist thing I thought, was the Destroyer out of the Thor film! Good start!

[aircav]

I like that, I think you’ve hit your own brief