The Startle Creature

Before settling on one kind of “creatureness”, I decided I wanted to do a brainstorm on the specific elements of what makes up a creature. I actually found that I asked myself a lot of questions in this process, such as whether a creature needs to be alive, and what it even means for something to be alive. I classified different words in categories that I would align with humans, animals, plants and artificial creatures, but while doing this I also realized that not everything fits in a “box”.

After this brainstorm, I wanted to continue with the idea of “reacting to the environment” and combine it with an emotive reaction. I decided to make a creature that shows a startled reaction. As straightforward way to do this, in my opinion, is by creating something that reacts to loud sounds.

Before sketching my creature I did some google image searches on different keywords related to startle. At some point I added words such as “startled animal” and “startled robot”, but interestingly even when I just googled “startle” I did not just find (human) facial expressions. For example, I found a cartoon of a pickle which had a typical startled facial expression.

Some key indicators of a startle that I noticed are:

- Big, protruding eyes

- Open mouth

- Movement of the body: sometimes the subject bounces backwards, away from the direction of the startling stimulus. I’ve also noticed that cats tend to curl upwards when startled.