I draw Greek Monsters - the RIGHT way!

[00:00:00]Way back. You thought I forgot, didn't you? I didn't. I was always going to come back to part three, but there was a reason I was holding off and I'll explain that later. But, for those of you who missed out on the first two parts, let's just say I have been going through a bit of an obsessive phase with Homer's Odyssey, specifically the epic depiction, Epic the Musical, but also I'm very excited for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, which I have to be honest, like this is not sponsored or anything.

[00:00:23]It's growing on me. There's some of the things that I initially had issues with, I have less of an issue with now that I'm seeing it through the style of interpretation. And since I found out that he's basing it on the version that is translated by Emily Wilson, which is the version that I listened to on audiobook and really liked, but also explains some of his choices. Anyways, I digress. In part one, I depicted a few of the main characters from Homer's Odyssey and that started to turn into the visuals of a poster, which I continued in part two, dedicating to the gods of The Odyssey and leaving space for what would be part three, which we are going to be doing in this video. You clicked on it, you know the thumbnail and title. We are doing the monsters of The Odyssey as they were depicted in the original text, but with our own creative license because Orpheus gets it, Chris Nolan gets it, I get mine, too. But, I'm going to mainly try and stick to the text. I'm going to start with the most obvious and the most famous of the monsters in The Odyssey and that is the Cyclops and we will be depicting none other than Polyphemus, son of Poseidon and the one whose interaction with Odysseus kind of starts this whole grudge that Poseidon has against him.

[00:01:34]So, after picking a few semi-final font options for what I'm going to call my epic Odyssey poster, cuz it's not Epic the Musical and it's not the Odyssey, it's not Chris Nolan's Odyssey, it's my version. Both, but none. With blackjack.

[00:01:48]And thankfully, there's a few key areas that I think some monsters are going to look just great. A nice key spot here on the right and then we're going to fill out a few other areas with the other monsters we're going to be getting to.

[00:02:01]And up next, the Laestrygonians.

[00:02:04]Just so you know, these are the big weird tin can soldier robot looking armored dudes in Chris Nolan's version. That's probably the one I have the biggest issue with. I don't think that's what they should look like. But you know what? I'm going to give him a lot of license with this interpretation. I just like the Odyssey, even if it's a weird different version that's with Batman and Spider-Man. It It's fine. It's Let's do it. Let's go.

[00:02:29]I'm I'm down.

[00:02:31]My Laestrygonians are going to be grouped up in the back there so that they look nice and giant cuz they're meant to sort of be reminiscent of mountain peaks that in their vastness.

[00:02:40]And then we're moving forward into the foreground, and a few of you have mentioned being excited about my interpretation of Scylla. Now, I've just put down a few little snake-ly hydra-like dragon dog face things. We'll get to Scylla. And then I'm kind of just sort of planning out how the bottom part of the poster would look sans focusing on any specific monsters. I was going to sort of try and put the Sirens and the Cyclops, [music] and I'm not going to draw them just cuz I can't pronounce it. Now, actually, I'm focusing on the whirlpool, and I want you to pretend that I've designed them, and they're just underwater. And last but not least, we need a spot for what will be the Sirens, which you'll notice I am not drawing as mermaids, rather winged creatures floating around the front right side of the title. And that is because the actual Sirens, the original Sirens, weren't like mermaid singing ladies. They were like bird chicks. Not like chicks, but you get what I mean. And for good measure, of course, Odysseus's ship in the foreground with a splash of a wave that it's sort of being lurched into that whirlpool and towards the underworld. So, I'm pretty happy with this as a rough composition to follow for the rest of this activity and what will become the final poster. So, let's start off. Sort of said let's start off with the Cyclops before and then didn't.

[00:03:56]Now we're going to do the Cyclops.

[00:03:59]Now, the Cyclops has been depicted in many ways and some of the ancient ways are either, you know, with one eye in the middle of the head or with normal eyes and an eye in the forehead. Because in a lot of text where it's described it's just sort of being said as like a a giant man with an eye in the middle of its forehead. It doesn't say only an eye in the middle of its forehead, at least in the earliest versions. But it's vague enough that I have to go with the way we've all traditionally depicted it and that is just with the one eye. So, with a human skull as reference I sort of roughed out what a Cyclops skull might look like and keeping in mind that is a very carnivorous meat-eating beasts.

[00:04:38]They eat sheep and people, just, you know, so definitely thickening out the structure of the jaw and sharpening those teeth to be a little bit more carnivore-like. And for good measure, an image of early man. I think partially because there's a an otherness about like Neanderthal imagery, [music] like early humanity before we were humans we were sort of something else and I sort of wanted to capture a little bit of that. Also, the Cyclops is a sort of really described as very primitive and beastly. So, I sort of wanted to sort of head backwards in our evolutionary reference to capture a bit of that. The other thing I realized is that the Cyclops should not be bald. If you look back at my reference sheet, most more modern depictions of the Cyclops have the bald head or a horn on his head, but it's the old depictions of the Cyclops where he has a beard and hair. And in Homer's Odyssey, Polyphemus is described as being unkempt and shaggy. So, he's a hairy boy. He's got to have shaggy hair and beard. And now that I have some references I can really lean on, I can use that really rough sketch that I did in terms of how he'd be composed in the poster and set to work recreating a sketch of my Polyphemus.

[00:05:55]>> [music] >> Now you might notice there's a little bit of an echo in his pose to Poseidon and that is intentional because he is Poseidon's son. This is a moment where they are both sort of unleashing their rage on Odysseus and I just wanted it to feel like there are it's a shared rage.

[00:06:18]We can see a little bit of that connection to his father. I don't know how genetics works. I was I was wondering that. I was like, should I make his skin a little bluish like his daddy like I did in that but you know, I don't think they factored much of that in in Greek mythology cuz a lot of gods' kids just not resembling parents.

[00:06:37]I've gone with a really earthy color for Polyphemus and for size, well, he's really got to be huge. He moves a boulder in front of the exit to the cave that Odysseus finds himself in so large that 22 of their wagons couldn't move the boulder out of the way. Spoilers by the way of this thousands year old text but he picks up and devours a bunch of Odysseus's men. It's brutal and gruesome and just, you know, a day's work for this guy. So he needed to be massive enough that he could easily pick up a man in one hand and, you know, take the top off.

[00:07:09]I I didn't depict it that bit yet. So that it's family friendly poster. You can pair it up with your grandma's aunt. Well, speaking of which, this will be a poster you can get. This will be a good place for me to put an ad spot. Get the poster now to support the channel but I don't want to spoil that in the video. So but I can do a different plug because the other plugs that we had for the other Odyssey videos were for Epic Anatomy which has finished on Kickstarter but we are still running late pledges and they are going to close soon. So you haven't yet missed out but you will miss out forever unless you go check it out. So if you love epic stuff, which you obviously do cuz you clicked on this video, well, you're going to love epic anatomy. It's your path to learning how to draw human anatomy in ways that you can apply in really fun and [music] creative situations like I'm doing here with this poster. The sky's the limit, go check it out. And a huge thank you to everyone who has backed our Kickstarter or who becomes a late pledger. We're going to be sending off that order very soon, so don't miss out. Now, we're plopping our cyclops in place just like that, and he's pretty unrefined compared to some of the other parts of the poster, but I'm going to be honest, I haven't been super refined in a lot of my painting in this anyway because of the help I'm going to get later. But for now, we've got a foundational Polyphemus, and now it's time to move on to the Laestrygonians.

[00:08:24]Now, descriptions of these guys are pretty vague at best. They're giant people that throw boulders. That is the universal thing that we know. They're bigger than the cyclops. They're like also described as, you know, being almost recognized as the peaks of mountains. They're so big, which is makes Nolan's depiction even more annoying to me cuz they could have been so epic, and we end up with a bunch of tin men lined up. They're cool in a way.

[00:08:50]If you don't reference the original text, I guess like if you have no idea about the Odyssey and you're not picky about it, you'd be like, "Oh, this is cool, big giant soldier dudes." But actually, both the cyclops and the Laestrygonians are again depicted as extremely primitive and also not really having civilization in the same way that the Greeks did. Greeks the whole Homeric text is very xenophobic. So, I have my rough sketch of a group of uh people about to hurl boulders. And because I didn't really have much to lean on the way of the descriptions of them, even depictions of them, most depictions of them are just sort of giant people or tin men. I've just gone in the same direction. Giant people, but because they're described as being mistaken for mountain peaks, I've decided to go with a bit of a sort of earthy texture, making them look like they could be built of [music] rocks and dirt and earth. And of course, the thing that they go to do is pick up the big rocks and hurl them. They're rocky boys.

[00:09:47]>> Odysseus! Get it?

[00:09:49]>> Cuz rocky. I'm sorry. Now, I've actually given them a bit of a greenish hue. And initially, that was just cuz I again, I thought earthy, maybe they it's like a natural sort of camouflage into the mountain tops and the tree tops. And I end up painting a little little bit of brown, a little bit of gray, [music] making them look a bit stony and mossy.

[00:10:05]But, it also works perfectly where they're positioned in the poster. This was a happy accident because we've got these nice gold green gradients around Zeus. That gradient towards the [music] the blues and purples elsewhere. So, it's kind of a perfect match. And I tried to further compliment that by adding a little bit of a golden hint of sunlight on the sides of them that are towards Zeus, which will hopefully also make everything feel like [music] it's all in the one place, but it makes it feel like it's all cohesive.

[00:10:30]And our posters started to look pretty cool with just a hint of uh the refinement that we're going to be getting. Now, onto Scylla. Now, where does one begin with Scylla? Well, [music] what the [ __ ] There's a bunch of depictions, and I think most people are just sort of as confused as I am as to how to depict her, it, them, all of the above. Now, there are two mythological origins of Scylla. One is that she's an ancient monster born of archaic sea deities. And the other is that she was a beautiful nymph tragically transformed into a horrible beast by Circe. Either way, she is meant to be a hideous beast, but also maybe meant to have been human-ish in form, pretty conventionally attractive, too conventionally attractive.

[00:11:15][laughter] So much so, she got punished for it.

[00:11:17]Those great goddesses ain't got no patience for competition. Suffice it to say, the final form of Scylla, and at least the one that Odysseus encounters, has many heads on long necks and makes the sound of barking dogs. I wanted to be a bit more creative and do something a bit more new and a bit more monstrous.

[00:11:35]And there are a few ways that this tends to [music] naturally veer around to. One is like the hydra, which is a multi-headed beast and also very sort of draconic and snake-like. Then there's the dog direction, which fair enough, but I want to sort of lean more towards sea creature and get some of those scales and skin things happening. And I've decided to have a main Scylla, which is like her her main figure, her main head and arms [music] and torso attached to a body that sort of splits out into all these other necks and monster heads. But [music] to make it feel like it's reasonable referring to her as one person, I've decided not to give like eyes or too many facial details or facial structures on those heads so that they're more just like extra limbs that happen to just be very teethy and tonguey.

[00:12:24]All of these heads have three rows of sharp teeth. I of course have to, like anything that is specifically [music] described, have to make sure is in my depiction cuz that's what we're doing here. She's also described as having 12 dangling feet without like joints.

[00:12:38]People again have interpreted this in different ways. I'm going the classic tentacles. So, sea creature, we've got a lot of little noodly things popping out with heads and well, let's just go with tentacles as well. And I'm trying to walk that line design-wise between dragon and snake [music] and sea creature. Now, I'm pretty happy with my overall design and in bringing her into the poster, I'm realizing the whole thing is starting to look like it needs a bit of help coming together. [music] It's a bit sporadic in terms of color and some of the positioning. So, instead of moving straight on to the next monster, I pick a color for Scylla that feels a little more harmonious with the overall design. A bit of a a sea green but highlighted from underneath with a fiery orangey red, which is a color I want to use as you can sort of see under the title. The gradient overall in the poster has gone sort of from green yellows up at the the [music] to sort of blue purples in the middle down to sort of this deep fiery red at the bottom.

[00:13:29]And I really want to lean into that and make sure that we can use these different areas of color to tie the whole poster together. So, though Scylla isn't red, we're using her to reflect that fiery red, and I go back into Polyphemus and do the same. Tint him with a lot more warmth and add a bunch of that fiery red underglow, which is perfect, too, cuz it's going to make it feel like there's heat emanating from the title. Speaking of the title, we're we're taking a vacation from monster designs and just playing with the poster now, playing with a few elements of the logo that we can sort of use to give it its own [music] flavor, so it's not just two generic font words. There was something about the arrow that I really liked. I think specifically because of at the end of the story, the trial that Odysseus has [music] to overcome, shooting the arrow through the axes, but also the arrow being long and pointed sort of feels like it's like a journey.

[00:14:18][music] We're going from here to there, right? It's all one big odyssey journey.

[00:14:22]But it felt a bit weird just sort of randomly between the two letters, and then I wasn't sold on anything yet, so I sort of drifted away from it to work on a little bit of the area underneath it to sort of see if I could get some ideas. And this is where I started to work on the whirlpool. [music] Now, this is tricky because it needs to feel and look like water and a whirlpool, but we've really clearly set up our color themes here, and the bottom is meant to be red, and we can't really make the ocean red without it just looking like an ocean of blood, and that is not part of the story. But I can try and light it dramatically, so it feels like there's red light, as if maybe there's a blood moon over the ocean or something. So, try and do that, and one of the ways I try and make that convincing is making sure that red isn't reflected in the center of the whirlpool, but on the surface of [music] the water, which I think is working pretty well, and makes it feel like this red is a light source that is being [music] shared amongst some of the assets in the post. One of which is, of course, Odysseus's boat. I just do a simple version of it for now, being sucked into that whirlpool. And then I find myself going back to the title. Mainly because I've kind of roughed out a lot of the core coloring around it that it feels like the right time to to pick the tone, the color, and vibrancy of the logo. Then it hit me, the arrow going through Odyssey. On the one hand, I think it really looks cool [music] and is very reminiscent of the trial in a literal way. It's it's the arrow going through something. And it also hints to the idea of Odysseus's trial relentlessly tested >> [laughter] >> in this book. So, having an arrow literally going through Odysseus or Odyssey, it's it's journey, it's that literal trial, it's his trials and being pierced. He's forever changed and transformed through his pain and the the trials he's gone through, the people he's lost. Because I'm really feeling like what we're looking at here is almost a great prototype for our poster.

[00:16:10]But there is one last addition we need to make. And that is the sirens.

[00:16:16]And when most people think of sirens, they think of the same thing. They have become mythologically just represented as spooky mermaids that are pretty until they're scary. That's kind of what they've become. And that's fine, it's become its own mythology and there have been different stories that depict them like that. But the original sirens were were just bird girls. Or at [snorts] least the depiction that matters in this activity, which is Homer's Odyssey, where they're described as hybrid creatures with the bodies of birds and the head or torso of human women. So, it's up to me to find out what my depiction of that would look like. And I choose to really stick quite literally to the original Homeric text, which is the point of my epic Odyssey is to [music] try and capture the vibe of the original story, but with of course some being carried by my inspiration of Epic the Musical and my excitement for the upcoming movie, which is not the sponsor of this video. And specifically, I'm anchoring on having more of a human-like torso and head and hair, but with arms that are transformed into wings and the lower body that is much more bird-like.

[00:17:22]It's almost reminiscent of like the harpy as we've come to know them in mythology, or at least much closer to a harpy than the sirens as we've come to know them. But this, I believe, is what Homer might have been describing in the story about Odysseus coming across the sirens. And at the very least, while not super detailed and more sort of like filling out the environment, I think they make a pretty cool addition to my epic odyssey poster. Which has really come together quite nicely. I'm going to add a few little touches here and there, mainly with the colors to make sure it all ties in together, but this is the bit I'm very excited about, and that is to get Alicia's help. This is one of the reasons that I've waited for several weeks to get back into it because Alicia's been on holiday for a few months and I had to wait for her to get back to help me take this across the finish line. Getting Alicia's help with this is one of my favorite things in the world because I get to do the thing that I love most, which is, you know, character design and composition, putting all this stuff together, but I also get the double enjoyment of seeing someone so talented really add to that professional polish that helps carry it over the finish line and make something truly spectacular. And I felt like my epic odyssey poster, the foundation I laid, was really cool. But with Alicia's help, it's just taken to a whole different level.

[00:19:10]>> [music] [music] >> Here it is after like over a week of work between Alicia and I, the epic odyssey poster. I'm so happy with it.

[00:19:50]It's so cool and for the first time we are doing signed posters. We've done signed A4 prints partially because shipping from Australia has been notoriously expensive, but we're getting help from Lumen's Workshop who have like I don't know like connections with the post office and so we're getting better shipping prices so we can finally do some bigger things. So, you want a signed edition A1 or A0 of the epic odyssey poster, check out the link in the description, go to the shop. It's a huge support to the channel. I have to be completely upfront with you guys. In the last couple of years I've been a little free flowing with how Alicia helps out with art in videos, but because times have been tight recently I can't justify really doing that unless it turns into a product at least for now. So, that is why we've sort of created this to sort of test out to see if putting a little bit more into something that I think you guys might want to get might lead to financially doing a little bit more to help justify getting her involved in videos like this. So, I'm really hoping you guys consider checking it out and if you don't want the poster itself you want the artwork I'm giving it to patrons of the artisan tier and above who also get all of the high quality artworks in full resolution that Alicia and I have worked on together over the years as well as downloadable 3D files from all of the sculptures I've done. There's various tiers of patronage and Patreon is [music] really one of the main ways we're able to stay afloat. So, go check out Patreon. I've been revamping the Patreon over the last couple of weeks making sure to give more and do more with Patreon [music] and create those connections and streams and all of these really cool rewards that are sort of listed in our on the Patreon page you can bet your booty you're going to be getting. So, go check it out all this out if you want to support the channel.

[00:21:25]Oh my god, it's so damn cold.

[00:21:27]>> [cough and clears throat] >> Doo doo boo.

[00:21:32]>> [groaning]