This was the product of a 3 week course on CGSociety taught by Bryan Wynia. The idea was to read the H P Lovecraft novella "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" which describes a sea dwelling race of creatures known as the Deep Ones. They have transformed from humans into something that looks both frog and fish like. We learnt a lot about Bryan's work-flow and techniques. Unfortunately, work and deadlines got in the way a little so I didn't spend nearly as much time as I should have on this. Having said that I was pretty pleased with the result.
The first stage of the process was to do 4 quick speed sculpts. You can see the original ideas in the left hand column. The initial sculpts were then copied 5 times and used as a base to explore new designs. It worked really well to be able to quickly get 20 concepts out.
Having picked the ideas, or combinations of elements, one of the sculpts was adjusted and refined.
With a quick polypaint and some extra material based renders the final image was comped in Photoshop.
Final Result: