Inspired by the very interesting The Keep FPS Game thread (which I can't find so am unfortunately unable to provide a link ) I thought it would be fun and wuite interesting to show you the development process that went into my latest illustration of a Rakosh, rather than just posting it.

If you didnt see me previous effort, it's here. It was quickly sketched in front of the TV and crudely painted, but it revealed the most obvious weakness in my representation of a Rakosh; the head.

Described in the books quite clearly as being shark-like, I struggled to draw it this way without it looking like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle so I quickly cheated it into a more conventional Venom-esque design. So it was the head that intimidated me the most when tackling a proper illustration of a Rakosh. . .

The only illustration of a Rakosh that I have seen that came close to how I pictured them in my head was the illustration on the cover of 'The Last Rakosh'



But it still isn't quite right to my eyes. To me, the head/face is more like an ancient Turtle than a shark; the snubby nose, the mouth and eyes on the front of the head (the mouth even having lips, despite being described in my edition of The Tomb as being lipless ) all made the head/face inaccurate.

*THE LAST RAKOSH SPOILERS*

I suppose the illustrator who did this had a very difficult commision; paint an image of a personification of violence that turns nice at the end of the book (!) I think that drawing a Rakosh is the same as drawing a muscly lump of solid hate, so I suppose that the illustrator who painted this had to make certain changes to make the illustration successful. The warmer palette and softened features make this Rakosh more cuddly and likeable, but it didn't serve as a template for how I would approach the subject.

*SPOLIERS END*

So I started by doing rough sketches of a Rakosh's head, so I could identify the ways that my drawings were inaccurate.

I was struggling to make the Rakosh head look sharky. The first sketch shows the general direction I started looking at. Making the head higher and longer than a human head is the way to go, though the risk of looking like either a fish or a TMNT is vast.

The second sketch shows an attempt to make the head look less TMNT-esque, though I ended up making it look like a dinosaur.

The third sketch is more Velociraptor-man than Rakosh.

The breakthrough came when I realized that it was the neck structure connecting the head above the shoulders that gave the impression that I was drawing some sort of lizardy/fishy man rather than a monster with certain unhuman sttributes. So by pushing the head forwards and down, lengthening the neck, I found that it was instantly more reminiscient of a shark's head seamlessly joining it's trunk.

This breakthrough came about from considering how to make the head more sharklike, and considering how a shark's head actually looks. Though when I referred back to The Last Rakosh's cover art, I saw that this anatomical structure was present there, too, and that I had simply overlooked it. It might have registered somewhere at the base of my brain, but I suddenly felt I knew which way to go from this point on.

My next step was to study a shark's anatomy in greater detail to inform my drawing of a shark-like visage. Like any good illustrator, I have a wealth of photoreference material to inform my practise (no one can know what everything looks like in intimate detail!) but in this case I turned to a Google Image search for GREAT WHITE SHARK.

My next step was to sketch a more worked-up image of a Rakosh, to try and see where I was with the design and what area needed further attention.

I felt that at this stage I was still missing the shark-mark a little bit. I was aware that the description of a Rakosh was that it's head was shark-like, and not that it had the head of a shark, but nevertheless I still felt as though this sketch made the Rakosh's head more immediately reminiscient of some sort of liard/crocodile than a shark.

So I needed to continue fiddling with the Rakosh's head, and I also felt that the lithe, toned body was maybe a little too slight, and could be made even more powerful/intimdating looking by making it slightly stockier and built up (I remembered someone mentioning that a Rakosh should be slightly gorilla-esque, but then being shot down by somebody else. In any case, I felt that the Rakosh should be a bit bigger than this!)

So I continued to fiddle with the Rakosh head, trying to make it more sharky and less lizardy from differnt angles (note the difficulty I had drawing it from the front, and how I slipped back into the old TMNT trap in the top right! ). I also paid some attention to designing a thicker, heavier, stockier physique.

No one can ever draw exactly what they see in their heads. But through lots of little sketched that all go wrong, little by little you can whittle out the things that are wrong and be left with something closer to what you intended. The most successful artists are those people with the patience to to gradually reconcile their images through painstaking practice to what they imagined it would look like.

I finally felt that I was ready to start on my final illustration. I began by doing lots of little thumbnail sketches of what I wanted to draw. I originally wanted to do an illustration of the inside of Kusum's ship from The Tomb, with lots of Rakoshi all gathered around him on his lift. This wold have been good fun, and a good oppourtunity to draw lots of different Rakoshi from all sorts of angles and positions, but I really wanted to see how successful my current version of a Rakosh went down with you guys before I started a major illustration like that.

I started by sketching the rough thumbnail on the right, of a Rakosh cracking open a corpse's jaw, preparing to gobble him up. The sketch on the left was a rough little run-through of the corpse's head detail so I had a clearer understanding of it's form. Then I was ready to tackle the final illustration . . . .

The final illustration. Compared with my first illustration (linked to in my first post) it is a much more resolved and detailed illustration that is much more accurate to my personal idea of a Rakosh and the original description.

The front cover of my copy of The Tomb has the Rakosh coloured green, and so whenever I read the novels I always pictured them this way (despite the decription of them being cobalt blue). So, contrary to my personal vision of a Rakosh I habe painted him blue.

I felt that a dingey, industrial, derelict setting was the most obvious solution to me, so as ever this is the one I avoided. It is always satisfying to create a sense of narrative even in a single panel illustration, so I set Scar-Lip in a run down mouldy old hotel. I made the wallpaper very posh and expensive looking, and a very intricate tiled floor to make the place look posh, but covered it in mould and shadows to describe the age and neglect that this posh old New York hotel has suffered through years of cold and mouldy dereliction. I felt this would be an interesting place for The Last Rakosh to make it's nest, and a creepy place to discover one jsut about to feed on it's latest victim.

I hope you found this thread interesting, and I hope that you all really like my latest Rakosh illustration. Please let me know what you think about it, your criticisms are very useful and improtant to me!

Thanks

:p

Really enjoyed reading your process Bones, and the final picture is great.

I look forward to seeing the cargo hold...

Dave

Very cool, Bones. Thanks for posting that.

Susan