Torathor's Monsters

Crazy weed what dances around and screams at people.

Speed draw video here:

https://youtu.be/BjdeDOGSFD8

It’s been a while, got a little too busy to keep up on the Final Fantasy 9 bestiary ^.^; Not that things have actually settled down any, just found a better way to manage my time. This guy sat half finished for like three months XD

So. Mandrakes. Or I guess with this spelling, mandrags...? Basically roots shaped like babies whose cry is supposed to be deadly, but also handy in the magical brand of folk medicine (re: Pan’s Labyrinth, Harry Potter). Wikipedia tells me it’s native to the Mediterranean, has rosette-shaped leaf patterns, bell flowers, yellow berries, and extremely potent alkaloid hallucinogenic properties -- what fun! “Clinical reports of the effects of consumption of Mandragora officinarum (as Mandragora autumnalis) include severe symptoms similar to those of atropine poisoning, including blurred vision, dilation of the pupils (mydriasis), dryness of the mouth, difficulty in urinating, dizziness, headache, vomiting, blushing and a rapid heart rate (tachycardia). Hyperactivity and hallucinations also occurred in the majority of patients.“ The lesson here is, DON’T EAT THE MANDRAKE. Ugh.

By H. Zell - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10660604

Squaresoft decided to take a somewhat lighter tack on these little demons, with their demented grin and frolicking around (hyperactivity XD) and their screams aren’t actually deadly, they just cause Silence. I just love the way they articulated their long frondy leaves so they whip and wave around ^.^

The shading on this took two completely different courses: super subtle and light on the body, and super rough on the leaves. It helped to differentiate between a plant monster that’s a trunk (which would’ve had rough bark) and one that’s a root (usually smooth and whitish). It looks like it could hide underground in the forest with just the ferny leaves poking up, and if the ground is soft enough, leap out at unwary passersby. Not entirely sure why they would though... maybe they drink blood? Would certainly explain the reddish stain on the teeth...

My only complaint with this monster is the source pic was tiny :/ If only I had a video capture box for my Playstation!

Giant crab what blows bubbles!

Speed draw video here:

https://youtu.be/GbK4cTspbJ8

I couldn’t find a nice big screen shot of this guy, which made drawing him difficult in general. Took a lot of staring to pick out his shape around the edges and to figure out the blurry pixels making up the shading. I think some of the pixellation wound up in the final piece, he’s got odd notches and bumps all over XD

The textures look a bit more intricate than I think the original monster had, it’s like I went all Shadow of the Colossus on his claws ^.^; Kind of interesting I guess.

Color was easy, everything except his eyes is this dull orangey brown. I liked the bright blue popping out, it’s interesting b/c color theory and also demonic lol Highlights and shading were kinda fun too, even though the tiny tiny source pic made it very difficult to pick out >.< Blue-purple shading, reddish middle and orange highlights, makes a rather drab brown crustacean slightly more realistic, if not more interesting.

More marsh monsters to come!

Follow me on all the social media!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6k88jqud13xZK_HxnzpKGA

https://www.facebook.com/torathor/

https://www.instagram.com/torathorsmonsters/?hl=en

Not exactly a hedgehog, not exactly a pie.

More of a bright magenta toad with purple spikes.

Watch the speed draw video here:

https://youtu.be/qucNqHlKLuM

I wasn’t expecting this level of detail out of this monster-- he seemed so simple and round until I looked closer XD Eleven sessions later, nine of which were shading, and you get nightmare fuel with pretty green eyes.

I think the “pie” part came from a mistranslation from Japanese, on par with calling a giant dumb gorilla Donkey Kong. They probably meant to call it a “fat hedgehog” and pies got mixed into it somehow. At least it lives up to its tasty name when Quin/a eats one ^.^

An insect knight rocking full plate armor and a spear.

Watch the speed draw video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ezVdtY_Fow&feature=youtu.be

I promised myself I wouldn’t do another FF9 pic until I’d gotten... another... video done, but then I did it anyway ^.^; Oh well.

Starting to think that working at 100% zoom is the best way to go. Makes sketch_line easier to control and the monster doesn’t become ridiculously huge on screen. She only took about 1/9 the total area of my canvas, right smack in the middle of it, and I didn’t have to resize or reposition her halfway through.

These guys always seemed grouchy to me in game XD Maybe it’s the fact they’re all called ladybugs re: A Bug’s Life. I think the devs at Squaresoft picked this kind of monster for the kingdom of Lindblum because of their penchant for knights and the fact you run into them on your way to Burmecia, home of the dragon knights. It makes sense from the perspective of samurai society: women as well as men could and did train in martial arts, and it’s easy to conflate that with the western idea of lords and ladies, where the ladies spent more time in battle than they did sitting in their castles.

Apparently, there are such a thing as blue ladybugs (or ladybirds if you’re European), but good luck googling a pic that isn’t photoshopped. The whole family of ladybugs runs the range of color from classic red, orange, and yellow to blue, dark grey, black, and brown. They can also have pinkish and whitish spots. Contrary to popular belief, the number of spots doesn’t denote a ladybug’s age, just its species. Also contrary to popular belief, not all ladybugs are pests. Some species are predators and beneficial to plants, while others are herbivorous and eat them. Obviously, the ones they sell at garden stores in great tubs are the carnivorous variety that either eat aphids, or lay eggs in them for their babies to eat (ew). They’re also not bugs, because they lack piercing and sucking mouth parts; the proper term is lady beetle, which sounds like a fan girl from the 60′s. Their larva are very odd:

So if you see anything that looks like a tiny dragon, leave it be.

Composite monster ho!

Watch the speed draw video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S28hYFo8nI

This guy took FOREVER. So many scales...

He’s actually one of my favorite monsters from the game, the first low-level monster I really fell in love with, with his sleek black head and badass scorpion tail. I wasn’t really keen on the rest of him, it looked like a bad British sweater vest with his furry arms sticking out of a scaly torso. Still, his poise was cool looking, particularly when he went into striking pose.

Thanks to the ridiculous amount of detail involved, I had to deal with my strange habit of gradually blowing up the size of each detail as I got to it, which meant he had a tiny head on a gradually larger body and HUGE legs. Thankfully, I learned how to squish him down to the right proportions with the select and morph tools Krita gives you. His thighs are naturally thick anyway, but the giant lion paws were definitely too much XD

I think they took some inspiration from the oldest and weirdest version of wyverns for this guy. Traditionally, they’re lions with the face of a man and bat wings and a scorpion tail, or a tail covered in spines. He’s got lion arms and a sorta feline body, but the rest of him is dragonish with a pure scorpion tail, which is an interesting take on an awkward monster. He’s the first dragon-type monster you encounter in the game, which is why it’s so nice of Freya and her Dragon Slayer ability to join your party just before encountering them the first time ^.^ Also teaches Mighty Guard to Quin/a.

The colouration was a little more interesting than normal. He didn’t seem to have a flat colour anywhere, to the point where I just had to pick one shade at random and add the others in the shading layer later. His head and tail have the same blue-black glossy look, which sounds easier to paint than it is XD I had to do a dark blue base and add grey smudges, light blue highlights and black shadows to get that effect. His scales are a dark half saturated goose shit green with yellowy and sky blue highlights, sea green shadows and dull purple penumbral shading, and SOMEHOW all that conglomerated into a lovely emerald shimmer down the length of his chest and legs. Then his lionish parts needed dull orangey brown base with greyish, reddish, greenish and yellowish smudges deployed apparently at random, but which somehow combined into tawny fur laid over svelt muscles. His back legs are pink. ‘nuff said. I learn more colour theory every time I paint one of these things XD

It’s starting to look like either the massive or more detailed monsters take 4 times longer than others-- the only other time it’s taken me 12 sessions to finish a monster were Trick Sparrow and Zaghnol. Probably has to do with the pattern in the scales, much more difficult to figure out when you have to draw it exactly right or risk throwing off the entire pattern more and more with each mistake. Random textures are much more forgiving of mistakes.

The longer breaks between videos are due entirely to the games I’m developing. I have no idea how often I’ll be able to draw and post, but I’m totes gonna draw all the things anyway. Meanwhile, I haz a massive backlog of videos from the games I’ve been drawing for, which will come out whenever they’re ready for promotion all over teh internetz :D You’ll be able to find them on my other Youtube channel, Torathor’s Original Art. (There’s already a couple game jam vids up there, check them out and one of the Ludum Dare submissions I did with Hippomancer Studios.)

Sounds like a bird, looks like a Welsh wyvern.

Watch the speed draw video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwHoHuGapcc

Spent hours trying to find a good quality image to work from, but the best I could do was a mere 178 x 163 px >.< Needless to say, there was a great deal of squinting and artistic license taken to try and interpret those blurs into scales. It’s moments like these that make me wish I had the equipment to take my own screen shots on my copy of the game.

Still, those hours spent working on teeny tiny half-blurred details on Valus paid off, and I was able to more or less figure out what went where. He’s got all kinds of interesting textures, smooth head, visceral looking mouth and tongue, scaly skin and webby wings. The wings I remember seeing on other monsters, the scales are a given considering it’s a dragon-type monster, but the head and mouth choices are the most interesting. I think they were trying to emphasize that it uses its head to bludgeon its enemies, so they smoothed out anything that might catch and streamlined it for maximum impact. The contrast with the inside of the mouth is interesting too-- since it beats its prey to a pulp first, it has no need for teeth and probably just swallows food whole. The mouth texture is so smooth as to make the tongue indistinguishable, something you see in animals like chameleons, and makes me think it must be sticky and probably acidic in there o.o

The colour choices remain consistent with the game’s style, dull sea green on dull gold with saturated blueish purple and royal purple. Bright red eye in the middle of a greenish head definitely makes it pop out, and not at all surprising, since this monster can petrify people with a glance. (Thankfully Lindblum shops sell armor for just that problem!)

Despite how much of a pain these guys can be in-game (what with running around with only one party member), I can’t help but feel this is one of the more clever monster models they used. Its proportions are superdeformed with almost no neck and just enough torso to support its enormous head, tail, and legs, and wings short and rigid enough to bring to mind flocks of these creatures flapping madly about the cliffs as they go about hunting and nesting and making adorable little gorgon babies. The fact that they’re derived from very old Welsh wyverns just adds to their charm.

Isn’t it just adorable? I almost wish you could saddle up and ride these instead of Chocobos.

The fiery spirit of explosive temper, not the horrible things people use to kill each other.

Watch the speed draw video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP0PbvLgKO4

At first I was a little blown away by how quickly this drawing was going compared to Zaghnol. He’s positively adorable XD Then I got to spend an hour blending the colours together and began to appreciate the level of detail and gradients put into this guy. Shading him also felt very odd, since he’s supposed to be pure fire. I still feel it’s a bit weird looking, but that’s how they did it in the game.

His hands are my favorite part, little barbed claws that look a bit like tongues of flame. His teeth were pretty fun too, and they actually inspired a pumpkin this Halloween XD

I put down the flat colours like usual (that’s never been more complicated than blending on this guy >.<) and then chose to put an extra layer on top with my favorite hair brush, rather than try to blend the edges of the flat colours together. I had some colour corrections to do and I’ve always found smearing colours very awkward. (Even with real paint, I choose to add another layer, even if the underlayer is still wet, to ensure the blending goes on smoothly and doesn’t turn to mud.) He had some purplish dark bits, but I elected to use a light black layer instead. I think he turned out much brighter for it.

All four monsters you encounter during Lindblum’s festival of the hunt.

Watch the compilation video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7seUaajcLE

The scale of these newer monsters is terrifying. I know there are smaller ones in the late stages of the game, but this first glimpse of an Outer Continent monster makes the Mist monsters adorable by comparison. It was a challenge to position the other three around Zaghnol so they weren’t about to get stepped on XD

Progression through drawing techniques is visible here too. Fang was one of the first monsters I drew, before I started using the hair brush for highlights, and Mu and Trick Sparrow were around before I started using select_color to keep the shading and highlights clean. Zaghnol definitely represents the pinnacle of my progress so far, mostly by dint of being the last monster I drew ^.^;

A giant boar from the Outer Continent.

It’s been a long while since I uploaded a new video, though to be fair, half of that might be how very very large this monster turned out XD Here’s the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZrYx4NciCg

He looked like the devil while I was working on his head and many many horns/tusks. That horizontal pupil makes him extra creepy too o.o The mane was fun, though the throat wrinkles were a pain. I liked his horns and hooves, particularly the cracks and worn down bits and the highlights on the ridges.

Colouring was a little odd, but only because it needed an orangey brown base with purple pink shadows and yellowish highlights. I’m not sure what school that style is from, only that it seems to be a thing with this bestiary. Probably could’ve saturated the blue bits of the mane more.

Thought the shading on his muscles was a mess until I looked at it on another computer, now it makes sense XD

Think my favorite part is his left brow horn, of all things. The other bits are at kind of an odd angle.

A big ugly Welsh looking dragon born from a random scribble.

I was just messing around in Krita, tired of working on everyone else’s art, and this thing came to be XD No video, unfortunately.

I used the same technique for this guy that I’ve done on all the Final Fantasy 9 monsters, with a layer of lines, shading and texture, and another layer of colour, highlights and shadows underneath. Looks a bit like a graphic novel style.

I used a bold sketch pen for the rough outline, then cleaned it up and used a lighter sketch for cleaned lines and shading.

The colours just kinda came out of nowhere, but I’m happy with the way it turned out. The Python pic was the biggest influence on his dull green scales; the bright oversaturated red tongue came from Cave Imp; but the purple just popped into mind as the polar opposite of the scales, super saturated purple with magenta highlights to contrast dull green.

His face turned out much more grotesque than I could’ve accomplished on purpose XD Clearly the trick to interesting heads is to just scribble and see what happens. The one thing I did put thought and effort into was the lower jaw, getting it wide wide open on a vertical line almost perpendicular to the top jaw. I see it every day with yawning cats, but had to battle my first instinct to put it at a mere 45 degree angle.

He was supposed to have just one alar phalange on each wing, but then a second one cropped up on one, so I was all “eh, the other one’s hidden on the other wing” and then it got cleaned up and the second claw just kinda vanished. I’m not terribly bothered by it-- he’s supposed to be ugly, after all.

He’s now the mascot for my new Youtube channel, Torathor’s Original Art.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsh2qYlNOK1CSJ0KqA7zbKQ

Supercut compilation video!

See the supercut here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lhp1B-qv2AI

I had to make mincemeat out of the 4 videos I put into this thing, some of them only 6 frames long thanks to the yippy-skippy tempo this song put to me. This is also the first time I had to rearrange the subjects into a pic for the final shot, which was harder than it sounds. Those sea lion wings are difficult to work around. Still, glad I could get him into another video and do an Ice Cavern compilation.

A tricky bird!

Watch the video here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUXIZqYksjk

This was another monster so small that shrinking him down got rid of a lot of details. It also made me sad because he’s one of my favorites.

He was quite difficult to draw, what with all the little feathers that were deceptively big and getting the head and beak angled just right. About the only thing that kept me at it was how much I loved him in the game,what with his croaky voice and swoopy attack animation. He really ought to be called a swallow with that tail, but we’ll forgive the creators for that one.

Wasn’t expecting the pink highlights or blue shadows on his tail feathers, but they were interesting o do when I got around to that part. Took nearly 2 weeks to finish, not because of continuous work ^.^; I’ve been remiss about drawing these guys every day. 

Forgive the pun....

Watch my most dramatic compilation yet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7rqsJxxupU

This video almost didn’t happen, since the song isn’t on the official soundtrack and I refused to use a clip with all the sound effects still on. Still, I really wanted to make a compilation of all three waltzes, so I searched around and a comment on a youtube video pointed me in the direction of the plus version of the soundtrack, full of all the little blurbs and bits that weren’t long enough to merit placement in the first version. (It’s not actually called Mage vs Mage, it’s Black Waltz Attacks, by the way.)

Compilation video!

Watch a nice soothing video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deLc5H45clI

I’d been thinking that I wish I could use more than two songs out of the whole soundtrack for my videos, and went through a couple ideas like speed paints of the areas, and finally settled on compilation videos of all the monster from that particular region. First up: Evil Forest!

I fiddled with the effects a bit to try and capture the mood of the acoustic guitar, but I’m not sure it was necessary to fade it in and out quite so much. Don’t really know what else I could‘ve done, besides the obvious two choices: jumpcuts or taking a bloody video editing class XD Will probably get around to the latter at some point, or just spend a few hours playing around. 

I composed the minions around the boss like that on purpose, and it’s like that in the final piece, but there’s also a few later monsters stacked up around and in the middle of this group that made final pics of other compilations slightly awkward and different from the big picture. Still, that’s just the way that goes. 

The end of the waltz!

See the end of the waltz here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31v42TKfcgA

This guy was always my favorite of the three Waltzes. His wings are fully developed and functional, he whips big bolts of lightning everywhere, plus he’s got that cool feathered collar he can hide behind like a puffed up grouse. 

Though he’s slightly more intimidating than that bird.... ^.^;

Think I managed to get his wings the right colour, but his collar is definitely too saturated and so are the leg flaps. Still, managed to get the colour right on his staff head, which was particularly difficult to outline thanks to its bulky design and light, smooth texture. Liked the tiny wings it had too ^.^

The middle of the waltz!

Watch the surprisingly well timed video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npnfptQVvCE

The hat was a pain from the get-go, what with the floaty band things making devil horns. I started suspecting that this monster was actually a female when I got to the front of her robe and realized there was a bit of a bulge there that wasn’t caused by overdeveloped pectorals or bagginess. So surprise! Black Waltz 2 is a girl! And a pretty scary and badass girl at that. I don’t think we ever saw any other female black mages in the rest of the game,... or maybe they just dressed them all up in the same uniforms. This one gets a raggedy dress robe, torn from the passage of the wind as she floats and teleports thither and yon.

I liked the claws sticking out of her wings, like overdeveloped phalanges from the dinosaur age. They look like they might work a little bit as wings, but maybe not necessary, what with the teleportation thing.

As in a bad habit, not a clamp....

Watch the super colourful video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SqGBkBziKU

This guy was a lot of fun to draw, even the awkward first stage of his face. He has a particular curving line that’s repeated all over the place in his helmet, head, trousers, scythe and crest that made it particularly enjoyable and fun--more a pattern than a monster sometimes. His overall shape was superdeformed and adorable, with disproportionate extremities that somehow balanced it all out.

The crest reminded me of ancient Roman helmets, but that’s where the Roman influence starts and ends. The rest of him is purely fantastic monster, with a hint of tongue-in-cheek in his parachute. Not entirely sure why he has a big bulging loincloth, except maybe they wanted a sweeping bit in front to balance out the sweeping trailing crest in back.

I’m not entirely sure how one would go about using that sickle though...