Developing Creature Evolutions

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and trying to consider in my own work is creature evolution when designing creatures, so I thought I’d share a few tips on that today with my own examples!

A lot of people like creature design because you can get quite weird with it and really use your imagination to come up with something unique, however it’s really important to make your creature designs feel believable and there’s lots of elements that need to work together to make this happen (but that’s for another blog post!). Here are a few tips that I think help to design believable creature evolutions.

Don’t just ‘scale up’.

It’s probably best to get the most important one out of the way first! When working on creature design evolutions, don’t just scale up or down your design. That’s not how evolution tends to work and it usually doesn’t look very believable; something that is key in creature design. This is evident in the real world too; which you should always be taking inspiration from. 

Some examples I like to use are penguins; baby penguins are often brown and super fluffy because they need to keep warm and don’t need to swim for food as it’s provided by their parents. Adult penguins however, have a totally different type of coat which is black and white and perfect for insulation and keeping water off their skin. It’s a similar thing with frogs, a frog starts as a tadpole which wouldn’t survive on land and is built to live in water. Eventually though they grow limbs and begin to be able to adapt to living on land. I guess the same could be said for humans too, although babies are just tiny adults, they are also very different in many ways! Don’t get me wrong there are animals that seem to be just a tiny version of the adult, a crocodile for example, however upon closer inspection you will realise that actually they do have different features that distinguish their age other than their size. This is why research and studies are so important as they will make a huge difference to the believability of your designs.

Focus on specific elements within the design.

Leading on from the last point, there does have to be balance overall, so the last thing you want to do is change absolutely everything about a creature as it evolves as it will no longer look like the same species. One thing that I’ve been doing is picking a few key elements (again not everything, just 2-4 areas) in the design to use as my sort of ‘evolutionary focal points’. So for example you can see with this fish design that the focus is on the teeth, tail, spikes and gills in particular. As the fish grows the tail becomes more extended at the top rather than the bottom, the fish grows more gills and spikes and the teeth become much more dominant giving the impression that this is a dangerous and aggressive fish when it reaches adulthood.

I did a similar thing with this one too (apologies but the examples in this post are all going to be fish!), with a focus being on the eyes, the tail, the fins on the back and the jaw. As the fish grows the jaw goes from a mouth with teeth to a fully solid beak-like jaw with integrated teeth and the tail extends more towards the bottom this time. The fish also starts to grow into its eyes more, it does grow more eyes but they don’t really change in size that much, it just grows into them more than anything along with its fins becoming much more well developed by adulthood.

You see a similar thing with my pirate shark too where the focus is on the coral spiked back more than anything along with the tiger shark patterning. This design does change quite a bit but by maintaining the coral and adjusting little bits like the colour and shapes language of the design whilst constantly checking the designs against each other worked out pretty well I think!

There is no hard set rule to this but I would just ensure you’re only focusing on a few elements when doing it, but having these developing focal points throughout your design really do make it much easier to maintain consistency and believability!

Consider their lifestyle.

This leads me onto my last point about considering a creature’s lifestyle when developing their evolutions too. One problem a lot of people have (and I occasionally do this myself) is that they just draw, they don’t really take time to understand who their character or creature really is which is a vital step of the design process. Take the time to write about your character or creature, it can be a brainstorm, notes, a few sentences etc. but you really need to define some important points about your design first such as their personality, hobbies, history, habitat, diet etc. all of which will massively help you in the design process.

You can also really nicely tie this in with the last two points too; avoiding just scaling up and focusing on specific elements. For example, if you know where a creature might live and what they eat, how might that change throughout their evolution? Maybe as a younger creature they’re fed softer foods by their parent and as an adult they have to break into hard shells to get the soft food, this indicates they will need some kind of breaking mechanism (maybe teeth or claws) that they don’t need as a young creature. It could even be something as simple as having the ability to fly, maybe as a young creature they can’t fly but evolve to be able to as an adult.

Without knowing your creature and your world though this step will be really difficult so it’s good to work this out first and will be a big step in making your design more believable!

I hope this helped anyone struggling with creature evolutions, I’m still quite new to this myself so always happy to hear other tips too!