KELPIE.

One of our projects in my illustration class was to take a poem that another class had made, and make a page spread illustration for it. The fun part was that each poem was based on a mythical creature and we had to design a monster based on them. Mine was the "kelpie". The aquatic horse that would drag those who tried to ride it to the bottom of the sea.

The only issue was that the poem I had gotten read more as a story about the grim reaper. A dog sees a figure come for his owner and gives his life to save the owner. Heartwarming, but ultimately not about a horse that steals people.

So to fuse the clashing concepts I made a grim reaper figure that released a horse-like blood-mist as it came for people's lives. I kept the colors to blue and dirty gold to make it feel like the kind of monster you'd catch at sea.

You can also see the Mike Mignola influence in terms of the design, the flat colors, and heavy blacks:

I'm really happy with how the piece turned out but man, we weren't able to talk to the poets and I really wanted to ask them what kind of monster they were imagining.