ARTICLE ARCHIVED FROM [ ??? ]
CATEGORY [ XENOBIOLOGY ]
ID [ K1B 12.03 ]
SHORT DESC [ SPECIES 0014 ]
NOTES
[ Though small, these creatures are vicious, opportunistic hunters in their own right. They rely on camouflage and concealment to ambush their prey, and are capable of digging rapidly or sprinting in short bursts. They have also been observed to construct burrows and underground traps. Their scaled hide provides some protection against the abrasive elements of their native environments, as well as attacks or predation by others. ]
Hey guys! This week I visited the Matthaei Botanical Gardens with my classmates for ARTDES 364 – Visualizing Science and took a lot of notes on the guided tour. We’re working on a project to revamp the Botanical Gardens’s map, so I made sketches of the general layout and where the different plants of interest are located.
I also took note of some botanical facts that made me imagine sci-fi speculative evolution worldbuilding for my own projects, especially the Indian banyan tree’s ever-encroaching roots that try to suffocate any plants in their path. In my own imagining they become the inspiration for giant biomechanical tendrils slowly engulfing ruins and wreckage from a bygone era.
All in all, I’m really glad that I got the opportunity to learn more about the botanical gardens for various creative projects that I’m gradually working on! Next week I’ll be selling in the Artist Alley at Katsucon in National Harbor, Maryland, so my weekly post will likely come later in the weekend than usual! Have a great week!
CATEGORY [ XENOBIOLOGY ]
ARTICLE ARCHIVED FROM [ ??? ]
ARTICLE NOTES:
[ These large creatures stand around 4.5-5.2 ft at the shoulders and are 8.3 to 10.5 ft long, and are native to the planet Khepri-1d. They have been domesticated for transportation and livestock purposes, providing protection and travel over uneven terrain and a source of leather and rudimentary armor. Their lumbering, heavyset appearance belies the surprising speed they can attain in quick, short bursts in defense of their herds. ]
Hello and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! This week I’m doing a quick breakdown of how I do digital painting studies to brush up on my fundamentals and improve my mental visual library for my drawing and design work. It’s generally better to do studies from life rather than from photographs because cameras distort reality and also you can understand the subject from more angles if you see it in real life. However, for this exercise I’m using a Shutterstock stock photograph because trying to find and draw an excavator on-site during the winter months is too much hassle for me personally.
My first step is to draw color blocks to get down the idea of the subject matter while not worrying too much about complete accuracy. It’s way easier to work with a drawing that already exists than with a blank canvas.
My next step is to tweak the proportions and start adding in details to represent what I see in front of me.
As I work on details, I realize that some of the proportions aren’t correct and fix them. This is also how I work on my regular art pieces — mistakes are just a natural part of the process and can be overcome!
The finished study now looks like this! It’s not a fully refined drawing, but I feel like I’ve done enough work to better understand how the different parts of an excavator work together, which was the goal of my study session anyway.
I even draw shapes over my study to solidify my understanding of what the basic building block shapes in an excavator are.
Of course, this is only one way to do studies, and there may be a way to learn that makes more sense to you! I just hope that talking through my process like this helps you discover what might work best for you in the future. See you next week!
KHEPRI-1B
CATEGORY [ XENOBIOLOGY ]
ARTICLE ARCHIVED FROM [ KATJA RUŽA KRALJ]
ARTICLE NOTES:
[ Grass windsurfers are a group of small, insectoid creatures which inhabit the windy darkgrass plains in the near-side terminator on Khepri-1b. Their prominent tail spine contains a folded thin membrane that can be expanded to act as a sail, allowing them to glide short distances on the strong and near-perpetual gusts in the region. Inflatable air sacs on either side of their bodies allow them some control over their own buoyancy. They often have bright eye-like markings on the dorsal side of their bodies, which likely serve the same purpose as eyespots seen in Earth life for deceiving predator or prey species. ]
Hello, and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! This week’s update is a little brief, since I’m just recapping the trip I took to the La Brea Tar Pits Museum in Los Angeles over winter break. When I was there I took the opportunity to draw some of the fossil skeletons on display to better understand the construction of animal bodies, as I hadn’t seen some of these skeletons in real life before and I want to make more creature/scientific illustrations in the future.
Something interesting about my trip there was that there was a glass windowed viewing area to look at scientists at work cleaning fossils recovered from the “tar” pits (which are actually filled with liquid asphalt!), and there were a few informational plaques and displays sitting on the windowsill ranging from excavated bugs and microshells to stuffed animals of the animals most commonly found in La Brea. There was also a scientific illustrator on staff (who I assume drew the lovely drawings on some of the plaques) who was actively working on a scientific illustration on their iPad when I was visiting. I especially enjoyed the puppet of the now-deceased mountain lion P-35, as I’d just read about his story in the excellent book “Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet”.
All in all, my visit to the La Brea Tar Pits left me feeling more inspired and motivated than before. While I doubt I’ll pursue scientific illustration as a full-time career, I still want to explore different subject matter I find interesting as much as I can so that my work will be versatile and never grow stale or predictable. And of course, there’s no need to travel far from home to do so — even back in Ann Arbor there’s several resources such as the Natural History Museum, the Leslie Science & Nature Center, and the Creature Conservancy that all have skeletons or live animals on display to see and understand in real life. That’s all for this week! What would you guys like to see me discuss next week? Let me know!
