Vampire parasite concept

Hi everyone! I’m sharing this Vampiric Parasite, a creature design I finished recently. For this design I wanted to explore a biological horror or body horror concept, a species of parasite that takes complete control of the body. The host loses total control of their body but remains fully conscious of everything happening, very much in the style of the Cordyceps fungus in The Last of Us. To capture this, I designed the parasite emerging from the stomach and tearing its way through the throat and mouth, completely ripping apart that area, I modified the lower jaw leaving only two lateral fangs to hold the prey while the parasite does the rest of the work. Initially, I had a much longer snake-like parasite in mind, but I discarded it to reach this final design. Other visual symptoms of the infection include severe anatomical mutations, such as skeletal deformities in the ribs and facial structure, as well as total alopecia in the host.

To carry out this design, I sculpted the base model in Nomad Sculpt as you can see, and then I did overpaint work in Infinite Painter to add details, textures and so on. For the initial sketches, I drew them with a ballpoint pen on paper when I was in the exploration phase; honestly I feel much more comfortable using traditional media for the sketches.