Aryana the Amblypygi (whip spider girl)

Hey guys, I had first planned to finish and submit this character for art war but I had to take a break for personal reasons and I ended up being unable to finish it in time. I'll just finish it for my own sake. I kept the original posts even though this is in a new category! So now i'm just looking for feedback and finishing it

Hi guys! I usually draw sci fi characters so I thought it was a great opportunity to get out of my comfort zone by making a fantasy one! Even though I love gritty and dark stuff I usually end up making very clean concepts and I want to push myself out of that.

The idea is a girl and her dog have been cursed and are slowly transforming into arachnid creatures. Her weapon works in two different ways: she can swing it like a kukri style blade or use it to grapple someone and eat his face. She and her dog can open their mouths very wide and let loose some big fangs and mandibles.
On the left is the sketch of the concept that i'm gonna polish up and on the right the original rough idea. Everything is subject to change, both are still very early and rough

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Disclaimer: I'm from Montreal and I know Quebec residents aren't illegible to the contest. I don't mind if i'm not officially considered, I just want to do it for cause it's an awesome challenge!

Thank you guys for the kind comments!

Thanks @armyerin1 for the critic! I tried fixing the leg up and I think it should make a bit more sense now.

@pamzilla I explored in a direction similar to what you proposed. The limbs are inspired by whip scoprions and would either always be there or come out of the back dead space style.

I've also had this idea that she has two ''stances'', the regular one where she looks threatening but more in a zombie/creepy fragile kind of way, and when she gets ready to attack she would put herself in a ''thread display'' posture with her mouth opening up and her back limbs coming out. I also thought that it would be cool if her lower jaw could split up vertically instead of having her mouth simply open very wide. Finally, I made her creepy arm longer for more creep factor and for serving as a third foot when she takes her threat display posture.

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Also note that I like dark and creepy stuff so forget about her finding a way to get rid of the curse hehe

im so edgy

Worked a bit more before bed, defined the face and stuff
g'night folks

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Hi guys! I want to have, next to the full character, two ''detail'' illustrations that show her neutral face versus her aggressive opened up one. I'm pretty much done and happy with the neutral face, but I am still exploring possibilities for how it would split up and what would come out of it.
Here's the neutral face and a few sketches. I'm gonna keep exploring and expanding on these ideas, there are so many possibilities!
(I know 1 and 2 look very similar, the difference is that in 1 she would drink the insides of her victims, just like a spider, and that in 2 she would drink their insides and then swallow what's left through a hole)

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I restarted the main sketch from scratch to make her look more feral and creature-looking. I thought it was problematic for the character to be so reminiscent of a Japanese horror girl while the rest of the design is inspired by occidental fantasy. I think making her look more adult fixed the problem. It so happens I also like it more this way Here's where it's at!

Here's a bit of progress, didn't get to work much on it today. Mostly fixed anatomical problems

Alright, so I took a 3 week break from this project and I've got some criticism from an ex-teacher, and he basically told me that my intent wasn't clear enough. It is true, I kind of went off-road and because I liked what I had made I settled for it. So I made a design brief with my intentions and here they are:

-creepy causasian girl mixed with a whip spider
-late teens/young adult (17 to 19 years old approximately)
-was made a living weapon by evil cultists who devote themselves to a spider god or something, so she has pieces of armor attached to her against her will (straps and nails going through her skin)
-medium armor, metallic parts + lots of leather, all of the body covered except for the head and the ''mutant'' parts.

As you can see, instead of inspiring myself from various arachnids, i'm going to take only the whip spider as a reference. My first intention was to make the character very young and I kind of lost that in my second iteration. I also really want her to feel like she's dangerous and even though she doesn't have a massive plate armor, she still has protection on most of her body. At first I wanted her to wear leather armor but ended up liking chain mail and leather straps better. I also gave her a name! She's Aryana. I thought it sounded cool and medieval, so here we go.

Anyways, here's the design for now! There are still a lot of things to refine and some to change, for example i'm not satisfied with the armor piece on the forearm. I also uploaded the naked anatomy base I made to build the armor over it. If you guys see any anatomical mistake that would really help me out!

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Here's an image showing exactly what elements I took from whip spiders and how I tried integrating them to my design:

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I'm a lot happier with this design! This really taught me why structuring my approach is important and i'm going to apply this in every future character design I make.