Designing Fish People

Some initial sketches for a race of alien fish people.

In my mind, they were supposed to be doofy-looking but not ugly, per se. They're a benign, non-monstrous lot. Quite friendly, actually.

One main issue I ran into was maintaining a fish-like appearance and not straying into lizard territory. However, I wanted them have something of a neck, so having the head sort of crane forward atop a vertical neck pushes the race into a weird lizard look. Even slightly dinosaur-ish. I played with the idea of having a rounder head, but the squashed-from-the-top head fit the dopey look I envisioned for them.

You know what cartoon has upright, walking fish people? SpongeBob. I noticed how their main bodies were relatively uniform blobs, like eggplants or something. You can see that I scrapped the neck and got this wonderfully awkward yet harmless-looking creature.

Now, I've read that using the same elements in both a race's design and their environment can help create a unified design on each front. So I grabbed a handful of sea elements and labeled them for what they could be good for, i.e. decorative bits, buildings, plant life, etc.

#sketch #genrechowderstudios