Crash McCreery

Armed with little more than a pencil and paper, this artist has designed creatures for some of the biggest films ever made, discovers Garrick Webster

- Garrick Webster

Every month, a new edition of ImagineFX arrives full of astounding artwork demonstrating a panoply of digital techniques. It makes it easy to forget that sometimes the very simplest drawing tool – a pencil – is all you need for a flourishing career in the world of fantasy art. The astounding portfolio of creature designer and Hollywood legend Mark ‘Crash’ McCreery proves the point.

“I hated crayons because I could never get them sharp enough,” he says. “Colour terrified me because I didn’t understand it. Pencil was always easiest for me – it was all about the purest sense of light, shadow and form.”

From his realistic shading of the liquid metal T-1000 in Terminator 2 (1991) to the dramatic form of Jurassic Park’s stomping T-Rex (1993) and on to the tentacled beard of Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006), Crash has captured the imaginations of the directors he’s worked with through the simplicity and charm of hand-drawn artwork. With such incredible natural talent, he’s never needed a powerful computer or advanced software to visualise his thoughts. Instead, he just… you know… starts drawing.