I recently streamed a character design for Fanstratics live on Twitch. The VOD will be up for a few weeks here on Twitch!

If you weren’t there for “Snakes on a Stream” here is a recap of where we started and where we ended up!:

Initial thumbnail comp! Just a little ink scribble, nothing fancy. Some of the design elements were off, but her heart was in the right place. The client asked me to change some of the armor and weaponry to fit better with their narrative goals.

A quick rework later and we have beefed up the weapon, lost the shoulder pads, and added some stone heads of her victims. After the client’s approval on this on, we are off to the races!

Well, not so fast!… First, we dig out some reference of poisonous reptiles of the Eastern USA, and do some little studies.  These drawings always turn out ugly, (thankfully nobody is in the chat yet, so it’s like it never happened at all,) but while they aren’t pretty, they are SO helpful for committing details about the creature to memory and internalizing the anatomy.

Doing this reference study also gave me some inspiration to go with a more unconventional snake for her hair, so we might end up with a more unique version of the classic mythological monster.

Next we do a quick transfer (off stream, because who wants to watch that???) and then we dive into the full drawing!

If you watch the VOD you’ll see that we got about 90% there on stream. After the stream I added a little more detail in 2B to push up those deeper shadows and occlusions.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this slightly different take on Medusa! We’ll be doing more monsters for Fanstratics on my Twitch channel in the coming months so stay tuned for more!