Nixe is a race of water creatures that lives in ponds and rivers. As described in my
previous post, some of them can shapeshift into water wyrms. In terms of anatomy, they're not that much different to humans, have a same number of limbs, walk on two legs, etc. However, due to the fact that water is a huge part of their habitat, some changes in their facial features occured along the evolution. And this important part of their physique I've decided to explore and establish first.
I've started by gathering bunch of reference images, photos of various sea creatures (like jelly fish and sea dragon), mostly looking for interesting shapes, colours and textures. I'm not after a specific animal or look and wasn't limiting myself just to the water creatures, but also looked at some bugs and beetles (since they're symmetrical and have interesting patterns).
To create a perfect (or almost perfect) symmetry I've drawn only half of the design and mirrored it. In case of some I used a different approach that was recently shown by Feng Zhu in a Level Up session 50. With lasso tool I've quickly marked a random area of from a reference photo, copied it, turned saturation down and played with tool such as 'perspective', 'scale' and 'warp'. This way I was able to create even more bizzare and uncanny designs and concentrate more on overall shape and form, rather than on single brush stroke.
I believe this approach worked very well for designing a water creature.
I've created 8 different options for each male and female Nix. From that I've narrowed it down to 6 designs that I'll explore a bit futher and use in final concept. I'm still unsure whetever they should have hair or not, maybe leaving
them bold with just tentacle like bits would work great. Probably, I'd
try both options just to see what works best.
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