With The New Alien Covenant Trailer Lurking Around I’m Going Through A Bit Of An Alien-phase. I Wanted

portrait of one of my D&D characters

Afternoon sketches

The Gates of Mul'Dingir

The City of the Gods,

Prior to their downfall at the hands of the archons, the Seer watched the world from their golden city. There, they wove tapestries of life and spun the great wheel of the world machine to move the heavens. When the cosmos grew large and their number few they created the servants, the first angels to work on their behalf. Unfortunately such a decision would lead to their demise.

Just some art from a fantasy world building project that's been in the back burner for a while. This is old art I drew years ago, finally got around to posting it here.

Work in progress illustration,

I'm slowly working on trying to get better at drawing backgrounds and i want to get in the practice of making more illustrations. There's a little story here, which i wont talk to much here other than its not a particularly happy one.

The Dram

A slight redesign of one of an older design, in color this time. These are the Dram, a mammal-like sophonts from an very earth like planet. On the left is a female and the right a male. They're the closets your going to get to a "humanoid" alien in the known galaxy.

Some bits on Biology

I call them mammal like but their not like placental mammals, they're really more akin to marsupials and monotremes in that young are hatched very underdeveloped and are nurtured in a pouch. While not depicted accurately here male dram are considerably larger than their female counterparts, and are around 2x times their size on average. They're feathers are display features which are used to express mood, and in mate selection. Oh and they're also venomous, they've got two fangs in their mandibles which in ancient times they'd use on their prey. They're aren't exactly immune to their own venom, but they are resistant to it.

The average global temperature on the dram home-world is considerably cooler than earth is while they are capable of regulating their own body temperature they do terribly in temps greater than 80 degrees fahrenheit, and often find room temp uncomfortable. When working in environments of other sophonts they tend to wear refrigerated chill suits.

Some bits on Culture

Dram family structures are similar to lions, so polygamy is the norm and their societies tend to be matriarchal. Their home-world is currently in its glacial maximum stage of their ice age so the northern hemisphere is largely covered in permanent ice sheets. Due to over industrialization by nations in the south their planet is unfortunately dealing with gradual global warming. The effects of which were much more intense and immediate due to their planets larger axial tilt than that of earth, so as you can imagine they're dealing with a lot of issues as a result. They were contacted by aliens , ~20 years ago and interacting with the wider galaxy has only added to their list of political and socio-economic problems.

In terms of tech, they're a little more advanced in some aspects and behind in others but they've got a comparable tech level to 21th century humans. (so us right now!) And they've already made crewed missions to other neighboring planets in their star system.

I really like the idea of the sort of role reversal, where instead of humans getting contacted by aliens its the other way around. Like I can imagine the dram equivalent of SETI discovering human ship or message and all the shenanigans that would cause. Would be a cool story i think.

Art practice, I've been working on cleaning up my anatomy, there are some parts which are still very much wonky, but its better than before.

Just a lot of sketching as of lately, its the holiday break and I'm soo not motivated to do anything substantial.

reworking an older alien design for the Dram, the old design looked to much like a griffon without wings, and i wanted them to look more alien but keep the original vibe.

And a portrait of a Lichenite, adding to my list of gene modded humans. Despite their appearance they aren't modified much, they're actually wearing an environmental suite made from a genetically engineered species of lichen that's grafted to the body (it not really removable). The horns are not a standard thing, their suits come from different cultivated species.

Slight redesign of the brakken, working on making another info-graph for space-encyclopedia but a few bits I'll share now, unlike a few other sophont species, the Brakken weren't originally a space fairing species in-fact they weren't even sapient. A few centuries prior they were genetically modified by the Imsee and uplifted further by them. So compared to other species in locale space, their societal history is incredibly short. They may look a bit like cats, but their social structure is similar to eusocial insects.

A bit more on the Imsee

Another page of space encyclopedia completed, this time the Brakken.

"The creation of the Brakken was a point of contention among the Imsee, as some argued that by intervening in the natural evolutionary process they were upsetting the consciousness within the cosmic intellect and that any knowledge gleamed from their work with the brakken is obscured and illegitimate. Eventually Imsee curiosity overrode any moral quandaries they may have had." - Sagan-V

I'm honestly sort of happy with how this one came out in the end, I've got a few more alien species I want to make introductory pages for, so I've got some cooking to do.