20,000 Leagues Under The Sea

http://www.premiumhollywood.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/20000_leagues_under_the_sea_1954.jpg

(please note this poster is the film poster; it holds no relation towards the book aside the title)

So for our next brief we have been asked to create three final pieces of concept around certain segments of a book, in my case, I recieved 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, which I'm really happy to recieve. Alongside these three pieces of concept art, there will also be work to support them.

Aids Campaign

We are meant to be designing out spliced selves with the idea that we travelled with our creature through a teleportation device, mine being the scorpion, but this image leads me else where....

It’s interesting the reaction I see when someone sees this image, first is disgust, then curiosity, then realisation of what aids can create, I believe these two posters are very effective, especially for those who fear scorpions and spiders...

Another thing to note is the fact that both these creatures come in a variety of colours, for example, the scorpion I am researching is a Deathstalker Scorpion which is indeed yellow, and I'm highly aware that spiders come in a range of colours; with the creatures colours it is also interesting to see the contract they have against the backgrounds, which of course is close to pure white. All these notifications are there for a reason, the colour of the creature to disgust and let us associate it with dirt, and the white backgrounds to bring this feeling forward to the viewer more.

I can also understand the choice of these two creatures, being two of the most feared insects its understandable to relate them to something you can see, but fear. When I was thinking of other creatures they could have possibly replaced them with also barely any come to mind, and the ones that do, don't match these two.

Supporting Splicing Scoprion Work (Scorpion Imagery)

So far I think the Scorpion's face will be the hardest element for me to capture correctly, the pincers should come naturally, but the tail also poses quite a threat to my creativity, which may unfortunately miss out on the final digital painting.



Supporting Splicing Scorpion Work (Similar Ideas and Concepts)

For our first creative project we were asked to splice and mutate our selves with a particular animal, and then do a self portait within Photoshop of ourselves, in my case, I recieved the Scorpion...this blog post will be going through some of the other ideas and concepts that are closely similar to mine; and hopefully will provide me with some real research and a good ground for me to base my final digital drawing off.

When I was handed the Scorpion, I instantly though of one movie, this being District 9:
"An extraterrestrial race forced to live in slum-like conditions on Earth suddenly finds a kindred spirit in a government agent who is exposed to their biotechnology."
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1136608/)

One particular character came to mind, Wikrus Van De Merwe, for those of you who have not seen the movie, Wikrus biologically (and unwillingly) becomes a ‘Prawn’ in which case is the alien race that has been recovered by the humans.

Throughout the movie we see the transformation of his hand, chest and back, which can seem quite close to the Scorpion...

This image (above) shows the first presentaiton of Wikrus starting to change within the movie, you can imagine having your arm unwrapped from a cast and finding it to be something completely different from what you imagine, as you probably suspected Wikrus did freak out. The claws/talons that you see with his arm are a great change from his regular fingers, not only does he not have five anymore but its quite possible they blended together due to there being no evidence of his fingers falling off and him having little notice of the change in process.

You can see from the face of Wikrus that his face shows no signs of dramatically changing, aside from his eye, which gives you the fear, what on Earth is this man turning into and what will he become?

This image in partciular (above) caught my eye, simply because I have to splice myself with a creature that has not internal skeleton, it has a external casing which is called a exoskeleton, which is only problem that I believe if I overcome will make my Scorpion all the more believable. As you can see from this image, Wikrus has parts of his exoskeleton growing out of him like shards of metal, which I think is the right approach to take regarding. There is also a large quanity of blood with this image, which suggests that their will be a lot of pain, this will also give me a good base for my pose of my final digital image that I will be creating.

This image is presenting the face of a 'Prawn' as you can see they look to have very hard casing around their head, alongside with some small tenticles, as you can probably imagine it would be quite easy to mistaken this creature for something else such as a spide, scorpion or even a bug like a centipede...

Another form of Scorpion and man is the Scorpion King from the movie 'The Mummy Returns' where the actor Dwayne Johnson becomes a member of hell after asking for power from the devil to provide him with a army, and the Devil also made him half man, half Scorpion.
Sorry for the poor image.

As you can see from the image of the Scorpion King it is simple his torso and head attached the body of a Scorpion, but the Scorpion body has been enlarged to make him more terrifying, im not entirely sure if I will follow a similar path as this creation, but it is most definitely one to note...
A completely different design is the character 'Scorpion' from the very popular The Amazing Spider-man animated series, in this the character 'Scorpion' took part in a experiment that allowed him to half the abilities of a Scorpion without any deformaties, in addion he attached a mechnical tale to his suit, thus making him Scorpion like...

With his tail, unlike the real Scorpion, he can use it to hold objects, as you can see from the image he is holding a character from the Spider-man series, I think this idea should come into my creative pool with my creation, due to the size of myself, and the size a Scorpions if it was to splice with me, this would most likely be possible.