Turkey-toed Gorillaclops!

Photoshop.  15.75 hours (including development and reference gathering).  Inspired by an old sketch and Ted from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.  Want to hear the story?
You may remember my Undead Rock Monster.

After drawing him, I wanted to try to push him more to follow my class assignment.  I really liked what I had already done, so I just made the inside of his mouth more like a geode.  Then I tried drawing him in different positions and I played with making his mouth into a hand.

 If I had drawn those sketches on paper, I would have crumpled them up and thrown them away.  I didn't like any of the front-on stuff, so I simply tried pushing the original pose, changed the lighting and pushed it and pushed it until I broke it... literally.

When I zoomed out really far on the middle design, I thought I saw a cyclops.  In a frenzied, frustrated effort due to lack of time to continue developing that day, I hashed out a really angry looking cyclops:

To ease my frustrations, the next time I developed him, I did some sketching on paper.  It's much more relaxing to me for some reason.  I tried to get to know this crazy creature and figure out what he looked like.

Blah!  Didn't like that one.  It was definitely missing the raw energy from before, so on to the next sketch:

  

Much more interesting!  I really enjoyed the shapes and design of this fella, so I did some color comps

I was liking the middle color comp most, but then my brain started saying 'this guy is dead center, that's no composition!  Put him in an action pose if you want to make it worth your time!'  So, I gave into the voices in my head and pushed on to these:

At this point, I had been working on this guy for a month off and on in my spare time.  I really needed to get moving and get finished so I could move on to my next assignment.  I decided I was much happier with the front on, dead center pose.  One night before going to bed (and after watching Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure), I had an image in my mind of a dumber-looking cyclops.  Typically, I work my ideas out on paper (or screen), but this time, I had a crystal clear image in my mind.  He came out looking like this:

This one made me giggle.  I could actually see more story with the character this way.  He's not some persistently ticked off jungle monster.  He's a big dumb cyclops who gets made fun of for his turkey toes.  Despite his weaknesses, he's got talons and major strength in his arms.  At this point, I realized I needed a lot of image reference to get the muscles, toes, and shading to look half-way decent.  I ended up with the final about 10 hours after I thought of giving him the big dumb face.