Colored In Background, Almost Done With It, Unfortunately, Like Half Of It Is Going To Be Covered Up.

aliens, I made a D&D character which was very much not human and needed some weird wild shape forms

Decided to do a bit of painting practice, tried a different technique, not sure how i feel about it, the colors are kinda dull.

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.

A redraw of my eldritch sona I drew last year.

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.

With the new alien covenant trailer lurking around I’m going through a bit of an alien-phase. I wanted to try my hand at drawing a xenomorph-human hybrid that wasn’t the monstrosity in Alien: Resurrection. Basically my take was a more fleshy fusion of Sil from species and a xenomorph. 

an art trade for @gt-ridel they asked for an axolotl dragon and I immediately thought of olms, so an olm wizard.

The Battle of Neptune IV by Oliver Cuthbertson