Concept original creature art

Roberto Padula paints an original creature, starting with sketches that help him to visualise his zoological ideas

Roberto Padula paints an original creature, starting with sketches that help him to visualise his zoological ideas.

Painting a fantasy creature can be a lot of fun. In my opinion you’ll struggle to find any subject that gives you more freedom to explore your ideas than creating a creature. Yet it’s this same freedom that can overwhelm many artists and lead to some serious design issues.

Once you accept the fact that you’re not bound by previously established notions of how your painting should look, you then become responsible for defining every single detail about this life form. Where does it live? What does it eat? How does it move? Where does it sit in the food chain?

It’s in this moment that most mistakes are made. The two most common ones are either copying a real-life animal too much and ending up with something that, say, looks like a horse in a different colour, or creating something so alien-looking that no one knows what it is.

The key to solve these problems is information. Study as many types of animals as you can and their evolution process will give you the understanding that you need to apply this same logic into your creature’s development. You’ll then be able to create something new, yet relatable.

In this workshop I’m going to discuss my design choices as well as my painting process and, if I’m lucky, by the end of it I’ll have painted a cool-looking creature!