Crafted By Colette

For December 1st-24th (and possibly a Christmas day bonus), I’ll be posting an art-related blog post every day.  If you visit my blog during this time, let me reassure you that I’m not just an art blog.  I do all the crafts.  You can look through my archives, or stay tuned for future posts, to see the other crafty things I get up to. 

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When I first started drawing original creatures I downloaded several million images from Pinterest showing lots of eyes and mouths and noses, so I’d have plenty of references to pick from.

Like this one, which is actually an advert for a set of vector images you can buy from Cremoo on Graphic River.

And this one, which is one of many many awesome monster creation images you can get from Expressive Monkey.

But one image that really intrigued me was this one:

It’s from Twin Dragonfly Designs, who used it for adorable little felt monsters.  It piqued my interest because it reminded me of a game called Beetle that my sister and I used to play as kids.  You have to roll the dice to get the correct body parts for the beetle, and the first person to get all the right body parts was the winner.

The second reason the image intrigued me was because I love dice.  I.  Really.  Love.  Dice.  I have several bajillions of them, and I love any excuse to use them.

It was a lot of fun.  And actually more challenging than you’d think.  You roll a leg.  Do you put that leg in the centre?  Or at the side, and keep rolling until you get another leg?  I rolled 13 times for this one, because I like the number 13.

But I wasn’t finished yet.  For a second attempt I wanted to predetermine how many times I was going to roll.  And to do that,  I used a dice.  I rolled a 10-sided dice, which told me to roll 9 times.  I also decided that was only so much spiky hair you could add, so I replaced “spiky hair” with “tail” for number 3.  And I ended up with this…

Yeah, you know what I was just saying about legs?  My fourth roll of nine was a leg.  Do I stick it in the centre?  But where will I stick other legs then?  If I stick it on the side, what if I don’t roll any other legs?  I didn’t roll any other legs.

For these two pieces I was adding things one at a time, as I rolled them.  I decided another way to do it, and a good way of figuring out where to put the legs, was to do all the rolling first.

So for take 3, I rolled the 10-sided dice, which told me to roll 4 times.  I rolled a mouth, a horn, an arm and an eye.  No legs at all.  So I ended up with a jelly creature.

For my fourth and final piece, I upped the ante.  I used a TWENTY-sided dice to tell me how many times to roll.  16.  So I ended up with 3 eyes, 4 mouths, 3 tails, 1 horn, 5 arms… and guess how many legs?

ZERO!  No legs!

So I cheated and made him stand on some of his many many arms.

Now I’m trying to train myself not to finish every single sketch – because it’s okay to just play around – so I wasn’t going to ink and colour all four little creatures.  But I did do this one…

I like the concept of randomising creatures.  You might have noticed that from my Huevember blog post, where I showed you my expanded “Roll a Monster” list.

I’m working on filling that second hundred up, so let me know if you have any ideas 🙂