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some stuff from my sketchbook and a my new pfp

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drew my caves of qud character and a few other critter things. Decided it was time to dust of my fine-liners and do some line art.

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The Battle of Neptune IV by Oliver Cuthbertson

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A tree thing and some robot drawings, not sure what direction i was going for the last robo but it was fun to draw

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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.

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Imsee Dancer

Imsee don't usually wear clothes most of the time, (its a hassle in the water) but when they do, its for the holidays. Dresses with long ribbons and bells are popular. Much like dolphins Imsee are adept at aquatic acrobatics and the bands and ribbons are designed to produce memorizing matters when twirled and spun.

Mix that in with some nifty anti-grav technology and you've got quite dazzling the display of dancers jumping from floating pools of waters.

Going to start designing some better clothes for my aliens.

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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.

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Redraw of an older character, learning a new art program and still getting used to it.

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Imsee Cuisine!

Imsee are opportunistic obligate carnivores so most of their diet consists primarily of meat and animal fats.  

Imsee lack taste, literally. During their evolutionary development  they lost the ability to taste all flavors except for salty and as a result imsee cuisine generally tends to emphasize, appearance, smell, and texture. Much of their food is very aromatic or pungent and is not always appealing to other sophonts. 

Imsee were kinda late to the whole using fire to cook things, mostly due to the difficulties of maintaining a fire pit close to their preferred living areas, i.e close to the water, and that their main appendages used to manipulate their environment sits on their face. Cooking gets a little dicey if you’ve got to put your face right up to an open flame. So cooking with a flame was not something that was done on a regular basis and was relegated to special occasions. Instead Imsee utilized either acid or parasite-cooking. Acid cooking works on a similar principle as ceviche, raw meat is soaked in a mild acid to clean it and to denature protein. Acids were typically derived from plants. In some instance food could be “cooked” in the harvested stomachs of other animals. Fire worms are small 6 limb vertebrates which spit acid as a form of self defense against predators and are a common source for acid in many imsee cultures. 

Now for parasite cooking:

Imsee are usually filled with parasites which they get from the food they eat. This isn’t particularly a problem for them as a healthy Imsee can live a long and happy life as they have a pretty strong immune system and advanced medical technology. Parasites are pretty prevalent among aquatic life on their home world and some are prone to breaking down their host tissues when they begin to proliferate making meat that is easier to break down and digest. They also provide a lot of intriguing texture that the imsee palette tends to like.  Early imsee farmers would purposely infect their animals specifically for that type of meat. Due to ethical concerns modern imsee no longer use live hosts for this but instead lab grown organ meat  instead. 

While fire stoves are pretty much non-existent in most Imsee households, they do utilize chemically heating pads. Sorta like a hot patch but gets hot enough to simmer water. Most heat pads can be reused multiple times but generally lose strength with subsequent use. 

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Haphazardly put together recap of my favorite artwork - 2024

Not as much art as i wanted to get done, but significantly more than I've ever done in, well years actually. I made this blog in 2018, and never really took art seriously until this year. I had actually considered quitting it all together a few years ago (general depression and lack of motivation), but found myself constantly wishing to write stories and making comics again but my skill was never in the place I wanted it to be.

Well this year, i got the guts to really get it together and try to improve and while its been difficult considering my lack of time nowadays (and my overall wish that i did it sooner) I'm happy that I started now rather than never.

There's still a lot I want to work on, skill and technique wise but I've discovered the mediums I like to work with, where i want my art to be skill wise, and what i need to do to get there. So for once, I have a sense of direction and even an action plan of sorts. And I've done the thing I initially set out to do, learn to draw robots (there's a long story in here but way too long for this post)

Anyway cheers to 2025, and hopefully nothing world shattering happens and another year of trying to Git Gud.

So long 2024, see y'all 2025, Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas!

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Alright, I've sorta only talked about humans a little bit in my world-building project union-station (working name considering changing it) but earthlings are kinda rare in space, mostly because they don't travel or migrate much. Most humans you'll see wondering the known galaxy are their genetically modified descendants. (I've taken to calling them colonists). Chimeras, are one such group. They're from a tropical world called Amazon (named after the then long gone amazon rainforest). Life on amazon had a higher degree of biological compatibility than on other alien planets, and a unique domain of life which was capable of modifying their own genome by integrating the genes of other organism. So when the first human colonists came to amazon, they opted to splice their genetics with some of the fauna there.

Genetically chimeras are a bit more biologically unstable than other old era colonists in that they're prone to some rather interesting mutations with the most common being the duplication of organs and other body parts. This amazonian is sporting an extra set of arms, which is a fairly common mutation among the population.

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a collection of fun doodles and studies, of some critters

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The parasitic wormfolk of Gnth are amicable people, they wear masks to give themselves faces

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Red Dragon, colored pencils

This is a scan, so its not nearly as vibrant as in person. I haven't done anything major in color pencil in years so it was fun to work on this. Also if you haven't noticed by now, I'm a really big dragon fan.

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Decided to do a slight redesign of my greylings i posted a long while back i want to do a big post on all of the "genetically modified humans" (i.e my excuse for humanoid aliens, as while I prefer non-humanoid aliens i still like the classic humanoid ones too) in my setting, I've been looking at a lot of fashion as of lately and was enamored by the work of balmain fall 2022, This outfit is fairly conventional but i really want clothing styles in union station to really weird and out there.

Inspiration was pretty much from these outfits

I'm going to try and find away to shoehorn these dresses in there some where, especially the one on the right

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Some more world-building notes, still experimenting with line-art, thinking of doing my line art traditionally in the future. Anyway some notes on early Imsee writing implements.

As a species with long lifespans, the imsee have incredibly detailed and extensive memory retention. So for a very long time, most of their knowledge was retained through oral tradition. However as settlements grew in size and social life more complex, they realized they needed a method of information storage. As an amphibious species, where water is a key aspect of everyday life, mediums like paper or ink simply weren’t an option for them. Instead Imsee's early writing utilized wax. Early wax tablets were derived from animal fat, which were then poured into a dish and hardened. Text is scrapped onto the surface using a needle. If the author wanted the text to be permanent a layer of resin was applied to its surface and placed into storage.

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just another batch of sketches, i haven't worked traditionally in a while, so have a messy doodle