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I think a point of focus could be eyes. For instance, I think you could make the kaiju at 20:20 look a lot less cartoony if he simply didn’t have eyes. I made this comment at the 20 minute mark. Nvm you talk about it at the end.

I personally love this style, i feel like almost every tcg tries to go for a realistic and gritty style, so seeing something more cartoonish with a unique style feels really refreshing

I recommend looking into speculative biology/evolution art work for inspiration for non-animal animals

TH-cam recommended this to me and I was very intrigued by the thumbnail. I like the way youveused hatching/screentone for the value! I think my main criticism/feedback for you would be that the reason everything looks cartoony is the shape design - if you break down a lot of these designs into their fundamental shapes, you're using a *lot* of big inorganic rounded shapes. This tends to signify things being soft, cute, and friendly. This can absolutely work for the less antagonisgic kaiju, but if you're aiming for a darker and grittier tone I think using sharper angles and dynamic shapes with less symmetry to them will help a ton. You're definitely doing the right thing by iterating the way you are though - you can learn a lot by examining your own work and seeing where you can improve.

Really love this man! Big TCG and Kaiju fan. I also really enjoy drawing. How are you getting those manga halftone effects? They look great!

The umbrella crab really reminds me of the mantis shrimp alien from Dandadan

For a bunch of the designs i felt like the eyes looked too human (same goes for how they were positioned on the) it made them look rather goofy. To make them look more monster-like, playing around with the eye type (hollow black, no eyes, pins, giant stalks, just light beams, a visor, etc...) and how many they have and how they're positioned (vertical above each other, on the chest, in a cross pattern, floating, just not there, etc...) would probably do wonders for the vibe they give off. Good luck with playing around with the designs. Have a great day.

your bashed out sketches are a good style.

The one at 16:50 is by far my favorite!

This video is relatable levels of brainstorming and self-doubt as someone who likes designing characters. Sometimes it's about giving a design time though. While you're making it it's the worst thing ever, but sometimes avoiding it for a couple of days and looking back at it it's fine. I think if you're having trouble figuring out the overall commonality you want the kaiju to have, it may be helpful to make a list of concepts, imagery, and stories you want to tell, as well as making a PureRef image board full of reference and inspiration images. The downside to this is that it may restrict your creativity though...

I think the first Kaiju your son drew does a good job conveying the idea. Rather than focusing on a specific style and tone, some digital card games have a range of style that all follow main guidelines(E.g Legends of Runeterra, Hearthstone). Those games have all sorts of characters, goofy, serious, enticing, bleak, energetic, reserved... And i think that could happen in your project, if that fits your vision of it. To have a Kaiju that looks wompy like a wet cat, and another that looks menacing with more over-designed details such as scale textures, fur, etc. One thing i noticed is that your kaiju are very expressive, and that sometimes can come off as cartoonish, or humane. If you want to change that, i suggest you look at images of animal eye physiology, horror manga and some old american horror comics. Having said all of that, i really like the project. Keep it up and look at undesireable results in an objective manner!

As a career designer and at-home still life artist, I find that i need a hard-set outline or rules to work within. That way i can focus artistically, and know what im reinforcing and when to break the rules. Love the series and excited for the development

22:02 i do like yes

Seeing your portfolio of work, i am confident that this will turn out great in the end, it just needs to go through the development paces! A suggestion with the art style; try to think of it in context of the world, perhaps these illustrations are the renditions done by the humans that have survived, with the simpler techniques and technology that they have managed to retain (hence the black and white colouring, and screen printing texture!) perhaps they aren’t literal depictions of the kaiju, but representations, affected by things such as folklore, half-remembered encounters and here say. Maybe the artists who drew these have never even seen them in person. I think that give a nice sort of logic to the art

a lot of kaiju are inspired by disasters so perhaps it could help by picking an interesting disasters/phenomena/events and designing a creature around that. like the slug kaiju could represent floods/tsunamis, an unstoppable force that will sweep away everything you've ever known, or that abominable snowman could be an avalanche, heard for miles around and will destroy you without even thinking about it as it just walks by. the umbrella crab made me think of some sort of recurring disaster like generational trauma. the robo rhino could be a captured kaiju that humans are trying to use as its personal defender with various implants trying to control it or make it even deadlier. kaijus also seem more terrifying or intimidating when their size is emphasized and seen from a human lens, from the street view or a news reporter's camera or military night vision from miles away with only the vague impression of *it* barely visible in the dark.

Just found your channel and I love it. I think the mycelium was a great idea. I think visually showing it growing through some circuits would look cool. Like the slime mold in a maze. Or if it took over sections of subway and became its own kaiju

I really like your Kaiju as they are but you're not happy and the rest of this comment addresses the things I think would help you achieve what I interpret to be your vision from what I'm hearing you say in your video. I don't think you can draw your way out of not having lore or proper world building. Sit down and concretise the lore. If you're a graphic designer not an illustrator that's fine. Approach this as a graphic design project. It seems as if you need to stop and write yourself a brief. In this video you sound like a client who knows what they want, can't articulate it but will know it when they see it. Every designer's worst nightmare. As for your Kaiju, a lot of the later ones seem like they wouldn't be out of place in One Punch Man. They're comical and endearing. I love One Punch Man but that doesn't seem like the vibe you're going for. I think it's all in their eyes and human features. What would those characters look like with no eyes, more eyes, mouths for eyes or insect eyes. They're also very pristine like they've never been involved in a fight and didn't evolve for fighting, they need scars, blood/goo, claws etc. The boar head is great the body not so much as you identified. You need to use more references when you're drawing. For example your octopus has no feature on his tentacles or texture on his skin. His eyes have round pupils. A real octopus is much creepier, its eyes look like glowing slits. One last thing I would say is stop erasing. Don't draw in pencil in your sketchbooks. Do ink drawings and instead of deleting your first few digital designs iterate and draw a whole page of the same character.

I think what you also need to do for your designs is give the Kaiju some personality, I know that giant monsters are meant to be mainly evil, but King Kong and Godzilla both have a distinct personality.

Shrumo, Toad, and Turtle all have a vaguely Japanese air about them, even the void one has the same effect, that could be why they all look so good together.

You say you hate most of your designs, but I love how they are rendered.

I love the smoke effect around Big Mouth's feet

If you're having trouble with trying to find the style you want here's a tip, look for a representation of what you think is too childish or cartoony, and a representation of what you think is too graphic or adult, then try and combine the two to find a middle ground.

something small that I think might help with some of the designs would be removing or obscuring the pupils. it could give them more of a distant, unreadable feeling, make them a bit more unsettling by making it hard to tell where they're looking. I think it could also help capture that trailcam type feeling, like the image was taken from an old news broadcast or they were photographed by accident by someone looking for something else. another thing I think could help would be obscuring more details of the kaiju's form and letting the viewer's imagination fill those things in, but that comes with the risk of making the cards hard to read. the other thing is, I recommend looking into japanese tokusatsu films from the 60s, a lot of the monster designs there are very colorful or goofy but they often still manage to cut an imposing figure.

The base line work of your early designs is kinda mid (I still love them), but once you add the shading it makes them amazing, I adore it.

Shrumo feels like a possible mascot for your game, they combine the two aspects of your world, giant kaijus, and fungi

Man I feel the style comments to my core. I’ll see something and think “damn,that’s so cool. I wonder if I can do something like that” and flip around so much.

In terms of trying to apply lore to the Kaiju, one of the things that struck me about your lore introduction video was it was based in the real world. I think something as simple as knowing where geographically these creatures are from, which ones interact, how any human survivors in the area would understand the kaiju, Godzilla to me is so intricately linked to Japan and Tokyo, maybe applying that same feeling to your kaiju will make them feel more grounded and lore connected

maybe use more reference images, chosen as much off of vibes as anything? I've always had the most success when I've had multiple reference images per design. Even with wierd eldrich monstrosities. Love your stuff man

I think a good reference for what you're going for would be Gamera's villain kaiju. They were designed with being able to appeal to children in mind but still had a sense of edge to them. Most of them took cues from animals but still were very bizarre and out there. Guiron looked vaguely reptilian but had a massive knife for a head. It was a little cartoony, but it still managed to seem threatening. Also, I like the boar yeti. Even if you don't I do.

@Jimmmm-u7w The artstyle design works already, i don't see a problem, what i think you wanna say is " what that the rules that i should follow to make the kaiju designs ", i mean why would you make a question about artsytle in a video about drawing the kaiju designs ? I like sketches 1 and the 2 , 8 ,9 that look like stages of evolution -Ancient Turtle, more balls ??? -Fake Bird , more fake features ? -Spirit Black Hole -Fire toad, without the nipples, and probably needs to look less like a animal, you know something more complex, more evolved I don't know how i feel about that human mushroom..... because when you start to talk about with part human design, we feel that you are talking about us, if this is about kaijus or the relationship with kaijus, that can change the way the public looks at kaijus, like just a random yu-gi-oh monster card...... Questions : Why did you select every 1 of the 7 kaiju origins - fire , water , nature , tech , mutant , spirit , alien. They don't seem to have a synergy in concept that solid, you want to indentify kaijus with origins to give them the status and other things but, what would nature, spirit, alien mean in battle or abilitys ? The origins have somethings in similar , like being antonyms - fire to water , nature to tech , and probably spirit and alien. Does magic exist on this planet ? Because that might change a loot of things...... There is just 1 origin that feels a bit more on the magical side, spirit. What are Kaijus they made of ? What are the minimal and maximal limit of size ? Is there some that you can't measure ? World war attracts the atention of kaijus from our planet and alien planets, why ? Do they fear us ? Do we have the biomes where they can live ? How : - kaijus born in your world ? - big is the planet ? What is feature about the kaiju concept that you are going to focus more ? - Monsters attract even stronger, bigger Monsters ? - That humans was just one of the levels of nature and Kaijus is the next ? - Creature designs that imitate the danger of weapons with the power to extinct humans? 1 step from extinction About the card battle rules, the rule that is about accusing the other player that it has too much cards would not make the game toxic ? I mean one of the players could just hide the card ......, or say show me all your cards !!! hmmmm..... which for a card game that is hmmm.................... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ideas : In your video - Considering Gameplay Mechanics for Kaiju Origins at 13:10 , i want to give an idea, 1 snake 2 slug 3 frog , they kinda look like 3 stages evolution . Now i will say, they like many other games they don't need to have a why for all things. !!!!!!!! Just the enough to pass the message.

I think that post-rationalization is perfectly ok! Thats how a masterpiece like Berserk was made, not to mention that these are still early renditions! I also believe that artists should take MORE cues from nature-humans evolved from nature and easily associate feelings, infer lore, and glimpse the kaijus lifestyle from their biology. This doesnt mean they have to look like a specific animal. for example, the turtle kaiju has pretty thin legs and well defined calves which would indicate agility, but you could make it more bottom heavy like zorah magdoros to convey its slow temperament and indifference-more like a mountain or natural disaster! maybe even give it extra legs to convey weight and to alienate it from the natural order on another note, i love the style! easy to comprehend and really juxtaposes the horrific and unknowable natures of these kaiju. i personally think that the detailed form and sharp designs are enough to convey adult appeal. i simply cannot see disney or pokemon designing something like your crab this is all just my opinion! someone else may disagree but ill gladly discuss it

Maybe try to get more human perspectives of the kaijus? The 3 that work are more viewed from the bottom, but having some seen from higher up could work if we get maybe a view from a helicopter or stuff like that in front. Also the 3 have some nice contrast and motion in common! I really like the fungus and weird turtle, they have an almost "japanese"/silly yokai vibe!

13:17, maybe the tech kaijus are made by humanity to fight back against the kaijus like in evangelion or Pacific rim, or they could be a rouge ai that made mechanical bodies to control to get revenge on the human race, this is just an idea

You hit the nail right on the head. If you cant figure out the style or the kaiju dont feel unified enough, then yea. Go back and do some quick back story stuff on the kaijus themselves. And the cool thing is once you start and have a foundation, then it'll all build on itself. For example, lets say the first few kaiju came from space, ok now those kaiju will look alien. Ok, why did they come to earth, well lets say they came to harvest materials and geoform the earth. Great, now you can design giant aliens that can capture materials and break things up. Great, next, let's say the spirit kaiju come from the emotions/legends that humans have. Ok, how did that come to happen? Why now? Well, now if we're stuck, we can go back to the first group. When the aliens came they brought k-cells with them. These cells help geoform the atmosphere for the kaiju but the side effect is that it has a small effect on humans giving them a certain amount of psychic abilities. And by themselves it does nothing but as a mass of people it can bring form to ideas thus the creation of kaiju that look like yokai and other folk lore mixed with kaiju. And you can just go from there. Mind you these are off the top of the head, but still, form that first part, that beginning idea, and you'll be fine. You already have the lore of the gane with the scientist so maybe you can work backwards from there. Also, what can help is talking to friends about it. If they are creative or interested in the topic then you guys can get lost in the lore and worldbuilding and youll have plenty of material to work with. If you dont have friends or just dont have friends that care or cant help, find groups of people on redidit or something talking about kaiju. Or read some fan stories of kaiju related material or topics like it and use that to build off of. And if you dont want to do that and still need help then call me on discord and bounce ideas off my head and we'll build it together😂. You got it bro cant wait for the next vid!

Yay more videos!

Loving these videos!

21:49 I don't know if you've already made up your mind but please don't give up on the boar guy! I love him! There's something about the huge mass of hair that's kinda inscrutable. Like the type of creature you'd see in a snow storm and you don't even know what you saw. 7:33 regarding the yokai/skull collector, to me he looks a bit like a tick, so maybe making it more insect-like could make it read more as kaiju? Plus I think tick + blood-sucker + skulls + drains the life forces out of victims could be a solid theme. Either way, big fan of your rendering style and I hope you keep up the amazing work!