Tentacle Creature: Design Research and Beginning Development

After doing a little research on how tentacles actually look, I began to think of what kind of creature I wanted to create. Right off the bat I knew I wanted my creature to "make sense"; I wanted to design something that you'd believe could easily have evolved to live in our oceans. I wanted it to have a place in a real environment rather than being designed purely for shock value, as if it were pulled straight from a horror movie.

I wasn't entirely sure about how I wanted the creature to look, so I picked up the idea of re-imagining existing land mammals with tentacles as a starting point.

The bear on the right was an attempt at thinking about how tentacles would "work" protruding from a creatures back if it also had limbs. I'm not happy with how it turned out, but I did realise that for tentacles to be an effective addition to a creature, their body structure must also be re-imagined.

The lion head I feel works a lot better. I like how the tentacles look in place of a mane, and would like to go on to develop a creature based around those aesthetics. The idea of the "king of the jungle" becoming "king of the ocean" is also an idea that could provoke some interesting designs.

The betta fish I sketched for its fins; I thought that they might also have a place in the design of the animal, particularly if the tentacles in this instance were used more for utility rather than movement.

Finally, the very loose sketch at the bottom was going to be incorporating my above ideas, however I quickly scrapped the thought of diving in head-first, and instead decided to seek out other artists' creations for inspiration.

The first thing I noted about the vast majority of designs I found was that these creatures are clearly all meant to be "monsters" of some kind. Seeing very few designs that weren't meant to be, for want of a better term, horrifying, in one way or another, it secured the idea in my head that i wanted to design a more natural-looking creature.

All of these designs, however, utilise tentacles expertly to define their creations; some clearly use their tentacles for both movement and other purposes, while others (such as the design on the far left,) have evidently been designed with the idea to completely weaponise the tentacles in mind.

These creations have taught me a lot about the ways in which tentacles can be used in a design, and that it is of paramount importance to consider their practical purpose when coming up with my character. Otherwise, by simply attaching these appendages to a body without knowing exactly how they benefit the creature, the design will be weak and unconvincing.

With this knowledge I hope to create a variety of designs for my tentacle creature, which I will publish in my next post.