I've always loved Greek mythology; I grew up with them being lodged into my subconscious. Here I've designed some Greek monsters as they might appear in a story telling app based game aimed at getting kids to think about the oral tradition, and how it relates to traditional story-telling in myths and folklore. What is it about these old epics that have stood the test of time, and transcended European culture?
Medusa! Probably one of the most famous gorgons in the common vernacular. Probably more well known than the name of her species.
I wanted to make her skin a kind of greyish green- a bit like a rock. Her hair is squiggly snakes, and her smile is big a pointy toothy.
There's not a lot more to say about Medusa, other than I endlessly debated her eye size/ style. I almost wanted to make her pupils split, like a snake's, but I thought that she looked friendlier this way.
The Minotaur is another fairly ubiquitous Greek Monster.
A bit of man, a bit of bull (fairly standard really). I guess having humanoid monsters makes them a bit more uncanny- it makes you wonder what they're thinking- whether they can be reasoned with, or if you might actually be the monster for slaying them.
The Minotaur, like a good number of us, was the victim of the poor beast's parentage. Fancy being the son of a sacrificial bull and an adulterous goddess of witchcraft. It must have been rough.
Anyway, there have been numerous renditions of the minotaur. Mine-o-taur (I hate myself for that) has been doodled by hand on paper, and rendered in Adobe Illustrator as a vector image.
The cyclops. I haven't actually seen a ginger cyclops before, but it's completely plausible.
Aside from the cyclops being a fairly mythical creature, there were apparently actually quite a few redheads in Ancient Greece. Ginger hair was associated with admirable traits such as honour and courage (according to my Google search, and a site called "ginger parrot", which I assume is a ginger supremacy website). Perceptions of people vary around the world; I'm sure that in most people's eyes, being ginger and burning in the sunlight runs pretty antithetical to a toasty mediterranean climate prior to the invention of sunscreen. Yet, despite this, gingers still survived and thrived. So there you go- I'm feeding the Google spiders, and praising redheads in one go. The truth is actually that I wanted to make my cyclop's skin blue, and orange contrasts quite well with blue.