Cyclops

Cyclops skin description

Imagine it is twilight and a large, watering eye and gaping mouth are barely visible in the region where the torch light fades away. Out of the gloom, a cyclops starts shambling toward you. His muscular arms are outstretched so he can grab you and ingest you in a single, swift motion. You hastily notch an arrow, or draw your sword, because you don’t want your digested skull to become the matching shoulder guard. My logic behind designing this skin is rather strange. I started with the plan of just shading an anime style eye on the sides of a cube to improve my technique. The eye needed to be really large to have sufficient pixels to capture the color variation and highlights as well as look roundish. To create depth, I added an eyelid and it became the whole head. I next experimented with shading a ridiculously oversized mouth on the torso section of the template. It started looking like a greenish caricature of a cyclops. In Ulysses, the cyclops dresses in animal skins (he herds sheep) and eats any humans he can capture. So to increase the creepy factor, I added a human skull as a shoulder guard and a raggedy animal hide toga thingy. I tried to shade the legs so they look slightly bent to give the cyclops an ape-like gait. The yellow, fungus encrusted nails might be a little over the top. Anyway, the final skin seems pretty terrifying in a cartoony sort of way.