From the Vault: Lhurgoyf 8th Ed (2003) Pt. 2
Having decided that I need to significantly boost the image’s dynamism, I tried to get the Lhurgoyf running.
This next set of images has him progressing from a starting pose to a canter to a full run. In the last of the three, there’s a little foreshortening and an exaggerated shrinkage of the Lhurgoyf’s legs giving more weight to the upper body. This made the figure less gangly and gave it a nice momentum.
I refined the concept, aligning the Lhurgoyf’s head with a straight, tensed neck to make it more aerodynamic. The limbs are rearranged to either enhance the sense of speed or to accentuate muscular tension. The torso is heavily tilted in the opposite direction to the hips to really push home that the Lhurgoyf is sprinting!
I take this sketch into the computer and draw several variations, altering weight, shading, detailing and tweaking some of the more knobbly parts of the Lhurgoyf’s anatomy. Finally when I have settled on the candidate for the sketch submission, I do one final render with added shadow to give it mass and of course a background, this time of a misty forest.
The Lhurgoyf is shown charging to protect its meal from an unseen opponent. One foreground addition is a rotting tree stump that shatters to nail home the velocity with which the Lhurgoyf is propelling itself forward. Some of the creature’s forward momentum is lost by the addition of some of the gnarly details on the Lhurgoyf’s back but being a stickler for continuity I’m not going to start cutting out elements of the creature’s anatomy for expediency (though tilting them a little more might have been wise).
After waiting a few days for the image to go through sign-offs, I heard back.
It was rejected.
Looks very cool, but a little too fast for a scavenger. I can see why they went with the other one. Looking forward to part 3!