Visual Diary- Mythical Creature Research Journal

Medusa by Caravaggio 1595

Genre: Horror

Artwork Type: Self-Portrait

 This painting was created by combining the artist drawing face and the headdress of snakes.

                                                                                

 Firstly, the idea came when he looked at himself in the mirror. Then he decided to draw out his crooked face. The face expression was strongly emphasized interesting in the head of the Medusa. It was culminated by the physical muscular action as protruding the eyes, furrowing the bridge of the nose, and opening the mouth in a scream.
   Next, his head was decorated by attaching the headdress of snakes. The snakes were instead of his hair. As a result, The Medusa’s head was accomplished.
   Finally, he also inspired from the Greek legendary as he painted the Medusa’s head on the round wood shield. According to the legendary, the Medusa's head which placed on the shield played a classical role as a direction to repel the enemy.

 13 x 17 Pencil 1994
In the collection of Todd and Rita Lockwood
Genre: Fantasy, Horror
Artwork Type: Pencil Drawing

  The above image of Cerberus is a pencil drawing. Inspired from the Greek mythical Cerberus, the artist drew this image which was imaginary to illustrate a horrible monster.
   It was composed by the dragons’ heads and the bodies of the dogs. Especially, to climax the genre of horror, the monster was drawn with the enormous mouths, the terribly sharp teeth and the whole body had the human bodies, skeletons and the frightened faces attached. When zooming to the image, the audiences could feel how painful these people were suffered through their dreadful face expressions.
  Furthermore, there were lots of human bones are scattered under its legs and on the ground. It seemed to me that there was the uncountable number of people who had been eaten by this monster. 
  Consequently, once again it gives the viewers the strong feeling and the horrible imagination of ‘Death’.

Zebra-Lionfish by Enryco

Genre: Fantasy

Artwork Type: Digital Photoshop Image

This artwork is about a surreal creature. It is the result of the combination of the two animals: Zebra and Lionfish. The body is belonged to the Zebra while its head is the Lionfish.  In my point of view, there are two main steps used to attain this result successfully.
  Firstly, the head needs to be fit with its ‘new’ body. To do this, after detaching from the background, the lionfish’s head will be cut apart from its tail and then it is also resized to a suitable size which is appropriate for the zebra’s body. 

  Similarly, the zebra’s head is taken out of its body. Then, the head is joined with the body by using the Photoshop cutting edged tools; layer blend modes layer masks and paint brush. The layer blend mode used here is ‘Lighten’. It lets the layers interact with each other by blending one layer to another layer below it. After that, the top layer is applied layer mask. This makes the specific part of the underneath layer is masked by the layer which is on top of it. The idea of the layer mask is that everything behind the mask is not visible and everything else is visible. Combining with the layer mask, the paint brush tool whose the color switched to black is used to hide some exceeded parts of the top layer with.
  Finally, the head changes its colors to black and white to suit with the body’s pattern color. It is done by applying image adjustments ‘Black and White”.