Sunday, September 6, 2009

Garden Goblins

A fun challenge for creature designers is to create a whole new being that is halfway between a human and something else. Mythology is full of composite creatures such as centaurs and minotaurs that combine parts of humans and animals. You can also infuse trees, vegetables, or manufactured objects with human traits.

Here are some designs for garden goblins. These started with a grocery bag full of sweet corn and ornamental gourds from a farm market.

The corn husks seemed like a logical material for their homemade costumes. I wanted them to look impish, so I also looked at photos of chimpanzees.

4 comments:

Steve said...

Impish? Or is that chimpish? Either way, way cute.

jeff jordan said...

My household task outdoors for the summer has been to remove some sort of hideous ground cover, a lawn alternative, I guess, from 45-50 years ago. It has woody stems and requires brutal moves with the pruning shears. Once it's removed from the ground, I then break it down to pieces 6" or less in length.

Anyway, in the process of doing this, some branches of this stuff, over red lava rock (what were they thinking?), reminded me of oddly proportioned Stick Figures. Now I have 10-15 of these potential, vaguely human-esque figures. Every time I think I'm gonna have some time to work on these thoughts, something more like work, i.e., something that might pay, comes along. I have a box full of possibilities, still big piles of ground cover waiting to be compacted. Seems like maybe a good winter project.

Mario said...

wonderful, so delicate and humorous.

Jason Peck said...

Hey James,

These are very cool little creations. I would love to see some of these as finished Illustrations.

Im also very impressed with the Garden Goblins hand drawn type face.

I have a hard time drawing convincing type face, but yours is great. Makes me want to practice my hand drawn type skills.

Best Jason