Can you help me de­sign a car­niv­o­rous fan­tasy plant?


Glenn Lums­den, US

Paco replies

In real life car­niv­o­rous plants are pretty much like a poacher’s snare or a pit trap, a sim­ple mech­a­nism that lures in­sects with a sweet smell to make them fall into the trap. So a re­al­ity-based car­niv­o­rous plant should be de­signed to look like one of those ‘traps’. But if you want to de­sign a fan­tasy-based car­niv­o­rous plant, you have no bound­aries – you can let your imag­i­na­tion fly, since in a fan­tasy set­ting a car­niv­o­rous plant could be able to move and attack, for ex­am­ple. So ba­si­cally you have to mix el­e­ments from two dif­fer­ent sources: plant-like el­e­ments and el­e­ments re­lated to car­niv­o­rous an­i­mals (such as jaws, fangs, claws…) or even just el­e­ments re­lated to the an­i­mal king­dom gen­er­ally (di­ges­tive sys­tem or veins). The pur­pose is to cre­ate a de­sign with el­e­ments that tells the viewer ‘this is a plant but it eats meat’.

So, for ex­am­ple, choose a plant and then choose an an­i­mal. Next, start think­ing about how to blend them to­gether, how to fuse an­i­mal traits into a plant – fangs could be­come thorns, tongues could be­come vines or skin could be­come bark. At the same time, try to keep the de­sign func­tional. Imag­ine how the plant hunts: is it a sim­ple trap like real car­niv­o­rous plants, or does it have some in­tel­li­gence, so that it can move and attack?

July 2015

For this plant I mixed a pump­kin with a bar­racuda, adding ‘veins’ and some­thing like in­testines in­side the pump­kin to sug­gest a di­ges­tive sys­tem. Don’t limit your­self to mix­ing ob­vi­ous choices, like a flower with hu­man teeth. Try to doo­dle dif­fer­ent an­i­mals and plants and see what you can come up with.

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