The Anthropophagous Mlekragg

The anthropophagous Mlekragg

My response to this week’s BestiaryPosting challenge, from @maniculum (thank you again for running these!)

Pencil sketch, then lines in Pentel brush pen, and colours with Derwent inktense paint.

As ever, reasoning under the cut...

"In India there is a beast called the Mlekragg. It has a triple row of teeth, the face of a man, and grey eyes; it it blood-red in color and has a lion’s body, a pointed tail with a sting like that of a scorpion, and a hissing voice. It delights in eating human flesh. Its feet are very powerful and it can jump so well that neither the largest of ditches nor the broadest of obstacles can keep it in."

Now, I'm 90% sure I know what this is, and if it is the case, it's interesting to read the original descrption… With that in mind, I figured I'd go with exactly what the authors wrote...

The first thing I wanted to work out was how the face worked; I looked at lion skulls, cat skulls and human skulls, and tried to combine the three - that's the drawing in the top left of the image. The rearmost (and longest) set of teeth are those of a lion, the middle set are those of a human (with the squared-off incisors), and the front (and smallest) teeth are those of a domestic cat. I used this as a reference when drawing the face of the creature. The ears were a little tricky to work out, but I figured I'd just stick with a lion's ears here, since they's almost part-way between a domestic cat and a humans's ears.

The eyes, I didn't have a grey paint, but I wanted to make them shaped more like a human. It felt like it needed a bit more going on, so I added some thick fur (almost a mane) on the back of the head and the neck; I really want to look at some other brush pen art, to get a better idea of what it's possible to do with this medium (I was hoping to get more of a flowing look to the hair actually like a lion's mane, which didn't pull off, but I feel this works with the general vibe of the creature…)

To reflect it's jumping prowess, I have the Mlekragg leaping straight up in the air. I really liked the idea of the image flowing like an 'S' shape, so that heavily informed a lot about the image. I did look up some reference from leaping cats (particularly snow leopards), but the size of the page and the decisions I'd already made meant the pose was kind of stuck - I feel like if I were to revisit this type of thing, I'd have it making a horizontal leap, arms outstretched. A lot of the proportions were taken directly from lions, but the unusual pose makes it look a little weird.

@sweetlyfez made the very valid point that at this point, its a running joke that we can't trust bestiary authors to know remotely what a scorpion looks like, so as long as there is some kind of 'stinger' we could go in any direction with the tail. However, I really wanted to draw a scorpion tail, so that's what we ended up with (scopions are rad). Did you know that in some lions, the tuft on the end of their tail conceals a sharp bone spur? (Lions are also rad)

It's red, it's got a very clear colour guide, what encouraged me to pull out the inktense paint blocks, and which was a nice change of pace too. I also think that next time, I need to draw the outline in pencil, ink with the brush pen, then colour - I painted the colour on before inking the lines, which meant it was really hard to see the pencil lines…!

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Underfist Jeff from the original promo art I made to sell the show. I altered the contrast to make it more visible since it was a pretty light drawing. Back then, I'd hand these off to our delightful cleanup artist Frank Homiski, and he'd put the final line on it. I did one of these for each of the characters and then assembled them in photoshop.

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