FMP: How can I combine human and non-human qualities to create a character?

After having a talk with one of my tutors, I decided to look at the anatomy of humans and non-human animals to resolve my problem of coming up with an effective way of combining both human and animal qualities. I have always been fascinated by anatomy because of its intricacy and complexity which I’ve always enjoyed looking at in books and other illustrations. I found these images from Pinterest which shows illustrations of realistic anatomies of mythical characters from the ancient Greek mythology.

I’m using these anatomical illustrations as a starting point for my final composition and style because I want to add a bit of realism to my images.

Looking at these anatomical illustrations reminded me of Eric Lacombe whose style of drawing, in my opinion, is borderline abstract and realistic. When I had my talk with one of my tutors, she pointed out that one of the drawings I created based on Kate Clark’s work looked like muscles and that established a link between Eric Lacombe and anatomy for me. Therefore I came up with the idea of combining Lacombe’s style and anatomical illustrations as a way of solving my current problem of creating a human hybrid.

From these tests/experimentations with Lacombe’s style, I tried to replicate the anatomy of an animal with his style of line drawing. I used anatomy books for drawing as my reference to create some of these drawings, and by replicating these, I was able to create something that is illustrative and quite modern and contemporary especially when I started to draw over a human face. This was a quite difficult process because I had to ensure that I’m able to maintain the true form of the animal’s head by contouring while sticking to the artist’s style. As I mentioned, Lacombe’s style of line drawing is quite similar to the appearance of muscles that I see anatomical books, therefore I exploited both Lacombe’s style and the realistic appearance of muscles to create the illusion that both are physically one. This is because I wanted to solve the problem of combining human and non-human qualities which what I was facing when I was exploring Kate Clark, whose work I didn’t strongly develop towards my own style.