Monster Family: Venus flytrap

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As a part of Visual Syntactics module at IDC School of Design, IIT Bombay we were asked to closely observe the characteristics of any plant of our choice and observe their characteristics. Later we had to translate these characteristics into a family of monsters and illustrate them with these features.

For this I chose Venus Flytrap.

Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula)

As I began exploring the characteristics of Venus Flytrap, I had this idea in my head that how would these monsters look like if Venus flytrap would eat everyday creatures which would then transform them into a monster with characteristics of the deadly Venus Flytrap.

For this I had to choose creatures that were not fairly large in size. I settled with the following creatures going forward:

Scorpion

Tortoise

Cricket

Snake

Bat

Dragonfly

Moth

Spider

Squid

With the creatures to be used for monsters decided, I began exploring the various stages of the Venus flytrap

life cycle:

Seed > Seedling > Young Adult Plant >Adult Plant

Venus flytrap cultivars

Stages of Venus flytrap life cycle

After finalising the creatures I established that the illustrations would be hand drawn with a 0.05, 0.1, 0.2mm micron pens and features would be captured using lines only. This would later be exported to digital platform for the final output and then printed as a 20cm x 20cm book. With everything in place I began sketching and produced the final set of monsters inspired by Venus flytrap.