Mortasheen - Hi Res FINAL Heartsucker and concept notes (Patreon)

Heartsucker is actually much, much older than Mortasheen - a doodle I made in 1998 (!) that was meant to be the combination of a flea and a kiwi bird, the Fleawi! By the time I added it to Mortasheen, my rule was that all arthropod creatures were hybridized with humans, but I kept the "kiwi shaped" design because it still had sort of humanoid qualities to me, its beak sort of like an exaggerated nose. My thinking was also that cartoon fleas are often given big, pointed snouts to bite with, too.

As one of my favorite monsters based on what I think is the absolute coolest looking insect, I put a record amount of time into perfecting this one...twice! I didn't like the first version I made, so I completely redid it from scratch, and I think this version improves it in every way. It feels more like a human-flea to me than it did before, and I was careful to make sure its "true face" looked cool to me even without the new, translucent "helmet" concept, which I basically lifted from Giger's Xenomorph.

The first helmet here is my new "default" design. The second is based on the bizarre "helmed" fleas in nature, which have an additional hat-like barbed panel on their head. The third helmet makes Heartsucker look like a more typical flea, and the final one brings it back to the "kiwi bird" design.

One of the biggest changes is also the number of limbs. Heartsucker always had just a single pair, but I decided I wanted it to have four limbs for an extra dash of the human-hybrid aspect. Since I still liked the two-limb design, I simply made its hind pair extremely tiny and vestigial.


A photoshop PSD is downloadable from this post, but beware my ridiculous number of layers; each of the four helmets even has its own folder of layers, and is also accompanied by a couple layers that provide each helmet with distinct shadows cast against the body.