Another Page Of Space Encyclopedia Completed, This Time The Brakken.

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.

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.

Been a little busy lately and and didn't have much time for art as of recently, but I've come up with another group of colonists. I don't have a name for them yet, but their essentially humans / alien hybrids who have a genetic trait which causes the duplication of certain organs or skeletal structure. This one is sporting an additional set of eyes. Just a quick bit of line art.

Old 3D model I made in zbrush years ago, unfortunately I lost the original file, but i managed to find an old screenshot, of this guy, my cursed D&D character Clarence Petch-Wayne-Smith III, a disgustingly rich eladrin (the highest of the high elves).

Mercurions, aka cyborgs

In my setting Union Station, humans have been in space for more than a millennium and as such have culturally diverged a lot from their terran ancestors. The history of the mercurions is kinda complex. For one, they aren't actually from mercury despite the name, they instead originate from the colony-ship Mercurion which was created as part of the New Horizon Initiative by the governing bodies of the sol system. The goal was to set humanity among the stars, but the Mercurion never arrived at its intended destination, and instead ended up 100 light-years off course in an unknown and hostile star system. Early, FTL at the time, was very risky.

Multiple catastrophe's aboard the mercurion caused the handful of survivors to turn to reproductive cloning and later cybernetics to survive.

As a culture, their society is highly stratified as a result of the Merilink system, a state-enforced caste system managed by a super computer (to be clear not a sentient AI). The initial idea behind Merilink, was to create a meritocracy, were all mercurions were born at the same level of citizenship / rights and could elevate their status based on merit, which usually ended up meaning either wealth or "labor productivity". As expected, it resulted in a deeply rooted system of inequality.

A long history of warfare, imperialism, and xenophobia has essentially left mercurion society fairly isolated from the rest of the interstellar community until fairly recently. There's a movement amoung them to reduce or even remove the merilink system although whether or not it'll actually happen is still up up in their air.

I still have a lot more to put out for these guy's I'm just really bad at getting it out of my head and onto paper

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

Yet another alien

markers, color pencils

WIP, on another illustration

A CSG construct has a minor disagreement with an Imsee ambassador

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.