Ampersandss

Made a 3D sculpt of my speculative evolution sophont. Took about a month to complete. Every scale is hand-sculpted and then drawn over again for colour. There’s a lot I’d change if I were to touch it again, but I’ve drawn one too many dots to remain sane.

Aaaand some various sketches and 2D drawings. I’m still figuring out how to make their anatomy weirder. I’ll likely ramp up posting here since I have more free time but no promises, I’m a bit of a lurker on large social medias. Would love to answer asks or hang out in specbio spaces though!

And for the curious, behind the scenes peeks at the rig and model. Glad that the final colours removed most of the “raw chicken” look, but there’s only so much you can do to make the bald, white, moist rodent not look strange outside of its pixellated confines.

Arqrons live on a planet orbiting fairly close to its star. As such, the air temperatures swing from 50°c during midday to 10°c at midnight. The actual landmasses consist of two continents and a vast amount of islands between them. Sudden rainfall is common with how much sea water evaporates each day. The most common biomes are steppes, deserts and tropics.

Because of the warmth and large quantities of light in the oceans, massive populations of algae, cyanobacteria and purple bacteria dominate the waters. Eukaryotic life has evolved an immunity to the threats they pose, such as cyanotoxins poisoning them. The algal blooms make for spectacular sights, painting the seas with purple, green and red. It is how the planet earns the name Arqrons call it, Thousandth Coast Amidst Spilled Colour.

It is, however, not funny to permanently stain your friends those colours by pushing them into the lake.

Arqrons enjoy swimming quite a lot when the water is an acceptable temperature, with much of their anatomy being unintentionally well-suited for the water despite being desert dwellers by origin. It is one of the reasons their species spread quickly; they could handle long journeys through both sea and dune.

I’ve been developing this world for so long I couldn’t summarize it in a single image, so I thought I’d start with a few characters from the single sapient species on the planet, who call themselves Arqrons. These are First Ruthless Strike (left, she/her), Three Red Rays (middle, he/they) and Sunlight Atop Tungsten Pillars (right, they/she). No subspecies involved, just a variety of ethnicities, body types and genders. The angle of their heads and their expressions tragically hide a lot of their fun features like their serrated beaks, split top lip and their ability to turn the latter inside out, but that can be for another post. They also speak with their nostrils, the flesh coloured holes on their forehead.

The banana horse and lizard seal are, unfortunately, the two characters that I think about the most and it takes much of my strength to not write 4 million words about them in this very post. All you really have to know is that I like writing sad, complicated people in complicated relationships to really capture that essence of being queer and in love in a hostile environment. Or they’re just gay aliens. Take your pick.