Mortasheen - Hi-res Amplifear and concept notes (Patreon)

This monster was a combination of two things: my desire to have more sound-based monsters and my urge to model something after the grideye, a real life deep sea fish with bright yellow pits instead of eyes. I exaggerated these a great deal for this design and added the bony "struts" inside, and I think the result is fairly eerie looking but could have stood to be a bit more detailed, shaded and highlighted; maybe I'll touch this one up soon.

I went through many, MANY ideas for the rest of the body, mouth and limbs. I often default to a simple quadruped or humanoid despite my love of weirder creatures, and I think that's often because I feel a more "ordinary" body helps to bring out a monster's stranger facial features. I think in this case, I avoided the normal quadruped anatomy but still kept the body simple enough not to distract too much from the focus of the skull structure.

I also opted for a kind of cute, mammalian, and toothless mouth because Mortasheen has more than enough fangs, suckers, mandibles and "zombie jaws" by now.

Spots, stripes and exotic color patterns are also something I've really neglected in this setting, not taking near enough advantage of how absurd the colors can get in real reptiles, amphibians, birds or insects. I didn't do much on this one but add some reticulation and spots; I hope to do some future monsters with bolder patterns, or even go back and mess with some existing ones.