Helpful Bear is a company at which
Terryl Whitlatch works as creature designer. I have admired her work for years, so when they have announced a
creature design contest, I decided to take part.
I know that I say I never participate in contests; but this one was not the sort where a company tries to get a lot of designs for a nominal prize. This was a contest by artists for artists, the reward was PR, and it was a chance for creature artists to get together. Just participating in such a contest is already good PR; I went through the complete list of submissions, and the amount of highly skilled and talented artists was impressive.
So I
had decided to design something fresh for this contest, a creature that
would be "readable" by us human beings but be completely alien in its anatomy, apart
from the obvious biomechanics. The Re-ti was the result.
It may seem almost Earthly, but if you look closer, few
things are what they seem at the first sight. Its "head" is not the
actual head, its "hooves/suckers" are neither hooves nor suckers, its
muscles can lock up in contracted position which enables it to use
hydraulics for "pushing muscles" along with the more conventional
pulling muscles, it communicates in two-voice tonal song, its hands were
originally copulatory organs, it is neither biped nor a quadruped, in
fact it is not even a vertebrate. Even its real name is unpronounceable for humans: it is a musical note D7, followed by sustained combination of D7 and B7 (hence the short-cut solfege designation of Re/Ti).
But it is still something we hominins
could relate to.
This creature is built on specific design logic, an imaginary Bauplan, if
you like. I believe that thinking of evolution of anatomy rather than inventing it straight away, offers more freedom for truly alien creatures than tweaking existing
animals or combining their pieces.
It is no paradox; nature always has to work with constraints, base its designs on prior designs, and reassign existing structures to novel tasks. If you set constraints for your creature and try to work with and around them, the result will be more natural, more believable, and in fact more creative than if you begin with unlimited possibilities.
Because this creature was developed with a body plan in mind, it is easy to design more creatures of the same phylum, which would be as diverse as fish, tigers, crocodiles, and
birds. Here is a small sampling I generated in less than an hour:
The concept was planned
on Dec 25, 2013 during a three-hour car trip to an airport. Most ideas that went into the creature had been devised at that time. Developed between Dec 27 -
29, rendered mostly on Dec 30 and 31, between other tasks.
The development sketches and high-resolution files can be found at http://chiseledrocks.com/main/concepts/reti . The contest submission is here.
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