Drawing Mass Effect 2: The Creation of Thane

GameInformer adds to their earlier Collector civilization article with an in-depth look at the creation of Mass Effect 2’s Drell assassin, Thane.  Once again, BioWare art director Derek Watts shares his insight:

(We almost started right from scratch again. We were trying to reference more reptiles and marine life. Then the women around the office found out about this, and they were like, ‘˜you guys get hot blue aliens, and we get a guy with a fish head.’ They were getting upset already, so we knew he had to be handsome. He had to have that assassin vibe. We had to be able to look into his eyes and get that feel from him. We also looked at Abe Sapien from Hellboy because his character is pretty interesting. We thought that might be a good reference for us to work towards.

The concept artist had an idea where maybe Thane could be a shape shifter. The problem is we would still have had to come up with one form that was his iconic appearance. If he shape shifts all the time you won’t be able to recognize what he looks like. You wouldn’t really be able to advertise him on posters and whatnot. If you look at the bottom row, third one over, you see that’s the one where we started to hone in on the final concept.)

Quite a few pieces of early concept art of Thane are included in the article, too.