Hurakan art challenge

Character silhouettes for another http://artorder.blogspot.com/ art challenge. This one is a 5 part contest starting with simple shapes and from there developing the character all the way to a final illustration.
It involves a Mayan god called Hurakan, the storm god, and one of the creators of the human race. Apparently his name means "one-leg", and I thought that that was an intersesting attribute to design around. Does he only have one leg? Who knows, but I figure that if he did appear on the material plane to a mortal, whatever form he took would be understood as one legged. So I thought this was a challenging aspect to design. I suppose its easier to design a character with two legs, but to make a one legged character functional is different.

I did about 20 silhouettes but the contest only calls for 3-5 so I chose the ones I thought were the most appealing and interesting.

Designing a god is always cool because the character is a god, almost anything can go. I envision him as a amalgam of human and animal, with lots of feathers and armor that is similar to Mayan clothing and jewelry. How human I make him remains to seen.

Stay tuned for more and thanks for looking.

Owlbears revisited

Hey Everyone, sorry long time no update. Ive been busy relearning the Maya 3D program the last few months and going nuts building models and rigging them. Ill be posting some of that stuff soon.

Anyway this is for a online contest for wizards of the coast, which is due in 20 minutes and I found out about and started this contest on thursday. Between full time construction, freelance and this, Im just happy I got it done.

Anyway the contest was to re-imagine a classic D&D creature called an owl bear, which essentially was a bear with the head of an owl. My re-imagining was more along the lines of a dog like creature with shades of Mothman thrown in. Anyway enjoy.


The Owlbear Revisited

The origins of the Owlbear are shrouded in mystery. First reports of the beast were described as the union of an owl and bear. Though Owlbears are of neither species and are more closely relate to canids. They have massive yellow eyes similar to an owls and a bony beak like snout with sharp jagged teeth protruding from their jaws. They tend to be about the size of a bear and are roguhly 10 to 12 feet in height when they rear up in battle. Males are covered in a thick bristly, coarse fur and have wicked talon like claws on their forepaws. They also have a flap of furry skin that extends from the forearms to the small area of the rear. It is rumored that they use this when jumping to glide for a short distance when pouncing on prey.

Males tend to be more brightly patterned than females, probably for use in attracting a mate, and also have a mane like collar around their necks and heads.

Less colorful females are naturally thinner, do not sport a mane and tend to have a thinner fur but tend to be larger than their male counterparts.

Owlbears have live births in litters of 2-3 pups, contrasting against the myth of Owlbear eggs, which sell in shops to the unwary and uninformed for vast profits . All pups are usually white for the first few months after birth, at which point they begin to change to the more characteristic colors of adult furs.