Hi-Res Mortasheen, Notes & Art File: Globnoxious (Patreon)

I don't know where I got a fascination for dead, rotten sea life as monster fodder; maybe it's just that I like sea life, and I like undead monsters, and nothing gets quite as putrid and ghoulish as a fish carcass baking on a beach.

Globsters are a long-time favorite "cryptid," even if I know they're all just half-eaten basking sharks, and I do have more than one Mortasheen creature evoking the concept.

This one however is the "most" Globster Mortasheen there is, being adapted from a fake Pokemon concept and now tying in with Mortasheen's family of smelly, walking fish.

For the design, I originally planned a shaggy, ragged looking pile of tissue with a whole lot of polypous growths resembling sponges, corals and barnacles, but that's not what a real globster looks like, and would perhaps work better for another unrelated monster.  I compromised by giving it a number of veins, pores, and the many large tubes that are actually kind of borrowed from sea squirts, but also comes out looking pleasantly like an enormous heart or body organ.

One thing that changed many times in conceiving of this monster was the relative size of the skeleton fish. At points, they were long serpentine things winding all around the globster, at other points they were just a couple of huge hydra-like skeletal fish heads. I finally settled more on a swarm of smaller ones so that they wouldn't distract too much from the globster itself, and because I love the idea of something like a "hive" of "bugs," but it's a bunch of dead fish.

The idea to have longer, more fearsome fish-bone heads emerging from the same mass may be applied to something else; maybe combined with the "tumorous coral reef" idea I mentioned early for a future counterpart to this creature, or an even larger more "legendary" entry into this line.

The arms are meant to feel ambiguously like a pair of flippers on a turtle-like animal and a pair of tentacles on a more mollusk-like animal, while the head is a homage to Hideshi Hino's Bug Boy, particularly this cover artwork: https://upload.bitfeed.co/5b9b803c1621b-bug-boy-hino

Attached is the art file; this monster has an excessive number of shadow and highlight layers.