Musamaw
Data suggests it once thrived in the sea. Alas, a great drought has caused it to evolve onto land, rendering its many tendrils useless.
It's that time of the year again: Bio-Cup. Though I'm not quite sure if I'll have time to participate (provided I make it through to the next round), I still wanted to enter something. With this year's preliminary theme of Space, I decided to go the extraterrestrial/cosmic horror route.
For this build, I decided to let the parts guide the build, rather than having a concrete, final idea. I've wanted to use the new banana bunch piece for something, and the tips of the bananas made a nice teeth texture. I then paired up two single bananas as fangs. Since yellow is such a high saturation color, I decided to go with a muted color palette for the rest of the build. This would bring more focus to the mouth, as well as ensure that none of the other colors competed with the yellow.
With the teeth in place, I covered the upper set with a sand blue clam shell along with a dark red galidor shield. Together, these create a nice color triad. I decided to not go with a traditional eye design and rather left it intentionally vague to further emphasize the extraterrestrial-ness of the creature. Furthermore, having an eye would have drawn attention away from the mouth.
With the way the head turned out, it reminded me of a fish, so I decided I wanted to do something with aquatic features. When building the transition from the head to body, I used dino tails and macaroni tiles to create a gill texture. The body then uses various dishes to create a scaled texture. The inclusion of olive green tendrils gives it a more unsettling appearance, further enhancing the alien look while complementing the dark red. However, as I was building, I felt the creature was a bit boring, so I decided to change up the narrative. I gave it a pair of legs, and created the narrative that it had evolved from an aquatic creature to land due to a great drought.
To further drive home this idea, I included a scenery piece. This piece used dark tan as the terrain, with fractured wedges for texture. I decided to create plant life similar to bleached coral to not only contrast with the creature's predominantly black body but also to represent plant life that previously had thrived in water.
Overall, this was a fun, quick build. Letting the parts completely guide the build process isn't something I normally do, but since I am quite busy with other projects at the moment, I figured this would be a neat opportunity to try this approach.
As a side note, the name Musamaw is a combination of Musa, referring to the genus that includes banana trees, and maw, or mouth. Just a fun name as a result of the parts used :)
