Official #conceptart for the "Skimwing" in #AvatarTheWayOfWater - Part 1. A Thread🧵
After hundreds of iterations and nearly a year of my life, under the guidance of @DylanColeArt, we finally arrived at this image to get the design over the finish line.
From the start, Jim had always described it as sort of a "badass flying fish". We always knew it was going to have 3 modes of movement: swimming underwater, "skimming" on top of the water in "ground effect" (an aircraft term I admit I had to google the first time Jim used it),
and full on flying for short periods: basically everything a flying fish could do...
It was also always conceived as a sort of aquatic biological "cousin" of the Banshee: splitting off from a shared branch at some point in the evolutionary family tree.
Early on, it actually *looked* much like a Banshee with flying fish wings, but as fans of the franchise ourselves, we knew we didn't want to just rehash designs from the first film.
Dylan encouraged me to explore alternate head shapes, and after a couple rounds, we came up with a sort of long snouted "Needlefish" design. Everyone in the Art Dept gravitated towards that version, so we thought we might be on to something...
One problem - we still had to convince #JamesCameron! When we presented what we had in one of the meetings, he was initially a little lukewarm. "Oh well" I thought "I guess it's going to look like a riff on a Banshee..."
But to my surprise, at the next meeting, Jim walks with in with a gigantic plastic skull of some kind of crocodilian animal (very similar to the one pictured here)...
Turns out it was a Gharial: a type of long, thin-snouted Crocodile native to India. I guess after sitting with it for a bit, Jim ended up really liking the direction, he just wanted us to beef it up from the spindly Needlefish design.
To Jim, it made total biological sense that this animal would have a long toothy snout adept at catching fish while moving at high speeds. So, we ran with our long-snouted Gharial/Gar version and never looked back!
That's it for part 1 - more art and more fun anecdotes coming in part 2!
You can see this, more of my #creaturedesign work, and a whole lot more spectacular artwork done by the #Avatar2 art team in "The Art of Avatar The Way of Water" art book by @TaraDBennett available wherever books are sold. Thanks, as always, for taking a look! 🐟🐊
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