Fen raft spider study, creature concept, and bonus misc. concept art

This spider study is for the Building Alliances/ Studio Practice group project, our team ended up choosing the brief about microplastics and its effect on the human food chain. We've veered off in a very fantasy/ abstract direction for this as you can see in the concept below:

Basically, microplastics are everywhere at the moment, including inside pretty much all living creatures. There is also a fungus that eats plastic, so I thought that after so many years (we haven't decided on a specific time frame yet, just that it's an extremely long time) that the fungus might have moved on to consume the plastic that's inside living things. Both the fungus and the microplastics could cause mutations leading to some pretty cool enemy designs, hence the infected spider. I've tagged this with Toolkit 2 as well because the spider study uses skills I learnt from Toolkit 1 (2D) last year. In both of these I decided to try out a different brush in FireAlpaca that I'd modified slightly, to give my drawings a more interesting texture. I still used my usual more watercolour/marker-like brush for some areas so that the pink sections are more visually distinct from the spider.

 

 

 

Some more concept art here, this was from beforewe decided on the microplastics brief so I put the spider underwater with a flooded Nottingham in mind.

This last sketch is a very minimal orca study, I just think they're cool. I decided to include this here as I don't really have enough to say about it to warrant it's own post, and this was also from before we decided on a brief so it won't really fit with the rest of my posts.

 

The reference picture I used for the spider as well as a long list of other inspirations/ reference images and other sources can be found in my general research document:

 

 

I'm leaving the link to the shared version here so that I can easily find and edit it as needed:

Research - silly studios - IP.docx