twocupsofsugar

[twocupsofsugar]

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!

[twocupsofsugar]

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.

[twocupsofsugar]

a collection of fun doodles and studies, of some critters

[twocupsofsugar]

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

[twocupsofsugar]

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.

[twocupsofsugar]

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

[twocupsofsugar]

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.

[twocupsofsugar]

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

[twocupsofsugar]

Just my current (wip). I'm working on another short comic, its only going to be a few pages, but hopefully you'll find it interesting. I'll post the whole comic once I'm finished drawing it

[twocupsofsugar]

another sketch, haven't drawn a humanoid robot / cyborg in a while wanted to see if i could apply some techniques i learned the past few months

[twocupsofsugar]

Thinking of some ideas for what a vreem language might look like. I figured since they have crab claws they would have a hard time using cylindrical writing tools so i came up with a stamp like pen instead. This is an example of Khlhk and is one of many vreem languages in my setting. It uses a vertical script of lines and dots and is an agglutination heavy language, so an entire sentence or phrase is also a single word.

Also an example of some graffiti with a stylized version of the script.

[twocupsofsugar]

Old Art Roundup from 2020

This was my art submission for the artbook "Girls Who Love Monsters". The kickstarter didn't succeed but the book was still available for print on demand. Either way it was a cool project to contribute to.

[twocupsofsugar]

its been a while since I've painted a creature thing. Was working on this way back, but my old tablet broke and that kinda made me loose my enthusiasms to finish it. Its done now.

[twocupsofsugar]

Finally finished this, some constructs

I refer to sapient/sentient machines in my setting as constructs partially because the term AI is really broad and can apply to a lot of different type of synthetic forms of life/existences. So to keep it simple all constructs are AI but not all AIs are constructs.

These two are some typical designs among CSG/Human (left) and Brakken (right) constructs. The first is a mobile assistant, a type of specialist construct that is meant to go places where an AI network can't while the other is a Brakken mother unit. The majority of human civilization is governed by the CSG, central service grid a vast AI network that manages all aspects of human civilization. They've governed earth and its many colonies for a very long time and most people under their care life relatively safe, post-scarcity lives. All the CSG has historically had problems with control and governing overreach.

The brakken are eusocial aliens who have a queen. The queens primary role is to produce new members for the colony, provide generation knowledge, and support colony cohesion via the psychoactive pheromones she produces. When the queen dies, a whole is left in the colony and in some instances another queen is unable to take her place. Sometimes colonies can reject the queen. Mother units are essentially bio computers which take on the role of a queen of a colony when needed.

[twocupsofsugar]

a little fan art lagi from panzer dragoon orta

[twocupsofsugar]

thinking more about my alien dolphin/whales

I'm thinking that Imsee evolved from an avian ancestor, something similar between a bat and pterodactyl that then transitioned to a semi-aquatic lifestyle. (which at least to me explains their body plan) So in a way a Imsee are weird penguins that just so happen to look like dolphins. Also, they are born with coat of fur which later sheds off during adolescence, and a bit like seals/otters they have to be taught how to swim by the adults.

I've also decided that the Imsee "species" is actually made up of three different closely related squid-whale species that can all reproduce with each other. Fig. A are River Imsee they have slender bodies and longer mandibles, B. Coastal Imsee, they're the most common and historically had the largest population on their homeworld, and C. are lake Imsee, they have stockier bodies and were typically found more inland than their river counterparts and were rarer too.

In modern times, Imsee are fairly homogeneous, due to a centuries of intermingling. So as a whole, they phenotypically vary a lot.

Now there is another species which are also Imsee, D. Deep Children. These are genetically modified Imsee who are adapted to a purely aquatic lifestyle. Imsee pretty have the best biotech around, and so deep children are created from adults who undergo a sort of metamorphasis via a pool of nanobots, called the Pond of Change. Its sort of a risky procedure (mostly because it heavily modifies the brain) and has a lot of ritual involved so its not something that's done casually. Deep children are a bit like biological super computers, anything that requires a lot of math and consideration, its usually a deep child that's figuring it out.

[twocupsofsugar]

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.