Creating a Monster: Hellkite (Patreon)

I honestly went into this one without any sort of plan. I got man-bat as part of a set with 3 batmans and a two-face, mostly because I needed to have some more conventionally attractive men in my collection, for diversity sake. MB was just a happy bonus, and with such an interesting silhouette I figured I could do something cool with him.

Two things started the design process with this one. I had secured a number of small metallic semispheres from the bubble packs of my allergy medication that I wanted to use for armoured breastplates or something. But when I brought them to the workshop they were clearly too large for any of my female figures, so I looked around and hey, they'd fit perfectly on MB. Then I thought, well, "go big or go home" or whatever.

Admiring my work, I noted the haunch of MB's back, the stubby legs, the long arms... It brought to mind Lovecraft's moon-beast creatures which are basically large gorilla-frogs with tentacles instead of faces. Probably an extension of the thought-train regarding Cthulhu as just a tentacled Dracula. 

With tentacles grafted onto his face and dipped in orange paint, yet another association came to mind. This time it was Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (literally Vampire Squid From Hell) or the Vampire Squid. With a slight adjustment to the tentacles, MB's head was already looking almost 1:1 with this intriguing deep sea trash-eater. 

At that point it was just a matter of unifying the colours and textures to make the individual parts work (and painting on the nipples).