Favorite Monster Designs

What kinds of archetypes, details, or components make cool monsters? Post your favorite designs or archetypes.

I personally really like creatures who have eyes sockets that are bigger than their eyeballs, stitches, multiple mouths, many sinewey veins that come together to form a limb, and a shitload of teeth. Golems/constructs/stone monsters are usually cool too, in addition to creepy semi-humanoids,
Also, it's cliche, but I'm a sucker for eldritch abominations.

It mostly depends on how exactly the monster is portrayed. I mean, I can enjoy seeing a stereotypical vampire or floating eyeball if they're done well.

But anyhow:

- Pitch black creatures with bright white eyes. Preferably of the cute variety, such as FF black mages or Kirby's dark matter, but I can enjoy a good shadowy demon of terror as well.

- Undead creatures of any variety (Even bedsheet ghosts!). But the weirder, the better.

- Drippy sludgy pollution monsters, similar to Hedorah or Muk.

- Creatures of many colors.

- Creatures that have totally weird, sometimes even pointless/novelty designs or powers. Dungeons and Dragons is good at this.

I seem to enjoy creatures that have pig-like noses, but that really only applies to more cartoony designs. I'll have to think about my preferences for more serious designs.

I think I wrote a webpage or blog or something about mine somewhere

I think I developed a sort of double taste when it comes to monster designs.

When it's about my own work, the kind of monsters I like to draw is a blend between kaijins, especially older Kamen Rider and Ultraman ones and the newer, poppier and trashier ones from sentai series, plus a big influence from Go Nagai's work. I like to draw crazy, psychedelic monsters, funny and scary at the same time. I think it's the most evident Japanese influence in my works.

Instead, when I want to see monsters everywhere else, like comics, videogames and other things I like a more balanced kind of design, something that would actually work in evolution, things related to the environment those creatures live in. The first name that comes to my mind is Wayne Barlowe, but I also think of Hitoshi Tomizawa's creatures from Alien 9 or Milk Closet. I kind of hate monsters made by mixing body parts of animals and stuff like that.
Another good example of this kind of design I like is one of the latest carnet Moebius published titled La Faune De Mars.

I love medical horror: Bandages, braces, syringes, scalpels, giant stitched-up incisions across the chest, all those appeal to me.

my tastes are always in flux, but wretched skulking little things (Gollum) are always a high ranking favorite.

Orcs have tickled my fancy for a long while too.

I kind of regret to say it since this might turn into yet ANOTHER dumb fetish thread if I do, but I also like sexy monsters. Not just 'monster girls', but big, sexy, bulky, monstrous, intimidating (preferably female) monsters.

As far as my own designs are concerned I'm generally biased towards either perversions of natural forms or designs drawn from cultural semiotics. Most of my own preferred designs are human in basic construction and I lean towards motifs such as gigantism, deformity, anorexia, obesity, chimerism, self mutilation and prosthesis.

I think a person's preferences in monsters actually do highlight quite a bit about themselves and the way they view the world around them.

i'm scared of things falling on me, what does that say about my view of the world?


That I spend too much time underneath ledges?

Some of my favorite designs come form Big Daddy Roth, Go Nagi, kaiju movies, castlevania and Pulp sifci art work. I fell that designs that complement the aesthetic tone of the series they come form are usually the best.

Yes, it also determines that the roof of a bootery will fall on you.

Wait I do have things to add that aren't already on the site!

I went through the following cycles throughout my childhood in what I both liked the most and drew the most:

-Things with rounded, soft, slimy, rubbery forms like mollusks, amphibians and fungi. I drew a lot of slimes, mushroom monsters and veiny things with sucker fingers, toothless, drooling mouths and no eyes.

-A polar opposite period where a monster achieved maximum coolness to me if it was thorny, armor-plated and multi-eyed. Everything had a chunky, crablike exoskeleton, even vertebrates, and lots of little spider-like eyes, sometimes mere specks. I think Metroid kicked this off.

-Gross, slimy aliens with unsettling bits and pieces of human anatomy, especially human faces situated anywhere but the actual head. I was probably just reaching ten or eleven when the Uncanny Valley became my favorite theme, long before the term was ever coined.

-Boring, sleek, spiky, scaly things with menacing "evil" eyes, long teeth and talons, right when Todd McFarlane was becoming the biggest name in comics and toys. I drew a lot of things that looked like Venom. (BUT I ONLY FUCKING REALIZE MCFARLANE CREATED VENOM JUST NOW WHEN I GOOGLED IT. HOW THE HELL IT'S SO OBVIOUS)

-Totally abstract forms. Fleshy shapes with appendages and orifices of indistinct purpose, no obvious front, back, top or bottom, largely inspired by some of Wayne Barlowe's art. I find these incredibly difficult to design to my liking anymore. Back then I'd just scribble some pointless shape, make it look like organic tissues, and somehow love it every time.

My love of giant eyeballs, embryonic shapes and slimy, dripping surfaces survived through each and every one of these phases, even if they became much rarer during some of them.

Now they all seem to have merged.

This is a fucking hard question cause one of the reasons I love monsters is the fact they can come in any shape or size or color or creed or blood type or shoe size.

Serpentine dragonish critters are way up on that list, though. Especially if they're drippy or have loads of eyes or some wormish or bug features.

Well, I will have to go with creature design styles of artists like Yasushi Nirasawa and Keita Amemiya. Because of the ways that can depict inhuman beings and creatures.

What ways, specifically?