This quarter at art school we can theoretically do whatever we want. Theoretically, because we still need to have some sort of concept and idea of what it has to represent of course. I’m immersing myself in the world of creature design, but I don’t have a ‘concept’ yet. -.- I just want to design creatures.

Anyway, as we need to post weekly blogposts on our school site about our research, I thought I could post them here as well. Seemed nice to share some progress of creatures and monsters, not? I started researching where all these creatures actually come from (or at least the most well known, the dragon).

Dragons appear in a lot of different myths all over the world. That is, these are all different beasts that we call a ‘dragon’, but when you delve deeper it appears that these creatures actually looked very different. There seems to be one thing they all have in common, though: they all have at least one snake-like feature.

This does make sense: venomous snakes live all across the world and were a pretty serious threat for people living in ancient times or the Middle Ages. Also think of Satan’s appearance of a snake in the Bible. Snakes are commonly associated with evil (at least in the western world).

One theory claims that our ancestors might have found dinosaur fossils and thought of the creature where those bones belong to. This is a rather tricky theory though, as there haven’t been found a lot dinosaur fossils around the Mediterranean Sea. Even more interesting, ancient bones were more attributed of heroes of the past rather than giant animals.

An other explanation says mystical creatures might came to existence through miscommunication and a different cultural reference. The myth of the unicorn could be very well a rinoceros described to a person who hasn’t seen any other large four-legged animals than horses and cattle.