This is another project I worked on for university during my 3rd year. The information design module was presented to us as an opportunity to create a project of our own design, the one major specification for the project was that it had to “Communicate Information about a topic that you are interested in”. From the beginning of the project I had a reasonable idea of what I wanted to produce, I wanted to create a field guide to a fictional creature. The creature in question being an Owlbear. Owlbears are classic monsters originating from the very first editions of the roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons and are a magical amalgamation of a owl and a bear. There have been a lot of versions of these creatures illustrated throughout the years so I began research into how I might draw them myself. I disovered that while they do maintain a mainly bear body type they are often supposed to walk on their hind legs leaving their arms free to gather food or attack as the need arises. My first sketch of my interpretation of their design was part of my Inktober for this year.
Having acquired more of an idea of the overall look of the creature I would be working with I began to gather the kind of page layouts I was going to be inspired by. I looked to the official books for dungeons and dragons, namely the Monster Manual, to find what it was about the layouts in these books that gave them such appeal.
The overall layout design in these books is fairly consistent. The text on the page is almost always accentuated by an accompanying image. This lends to the information in the text and really brings the page to life.
I also started to look into diagrams that might go into a field guide for animals. These diagrams generally covered the same topics from life-cycles and territories to anatomy and diet habits. I wanted to create something along the lines of a bestiary for this fantasy creature so these examples felt perfect for what I was trying to create.
Given this start I moved on to planning the page layout of my project. I wanted to hit five main areas in order to create something that felt comprehensive, those being Life Cycle, Anatomy, Habitat, Diet and Behaviours and Origin. I did some basic layout sketches to get more of an idea of how to proceed.
Finally after I had decided on my final layouts and page count I started work on producing the pages themselves, I wanted to create the impression that this project had been done by a researcher in the field so I used a variety of rendering techniques to create the various drawings and paintings throughout the project.
This final version of the project was quite successful, I was able to produce a quantity of artwork which fit the brief. Overall this would have been more complete if I had included the relevant text to accompany the images however I made the art my main focus during the production of the project. I was pleased with the outcome of this project as I was sceptical at the beginning as to whether or not I’d be able to produce enough content to meet my initial idea.