June MOTM: alien lover - concept sketch + design commentary // nsfw

 thanks again to hasard for suggesting something alien for the MOTM polls!

i went into this thinking it would be relatively easy and straightforward to design an alien. extraterrestrials are everywhere nowadays and their designs are so very diverse. there's no rules for how they should look, so how hard could it be?

well, it proved harder than i thought to design a monster that would immediately make someone think "alien" rather than any other random category of monsters. the very diversity i just mentioned was the "problem." if aliens can look like anything, how do you make sure they look like an alien? with endless possibilities to choose from, you run the risk of designing something that accidentally looks more like a different type of creature, or that leaves people confused about their classification. 

i started thinking about various depictions of aliens in media. there's the green martian with huge eyes and maybe antennae, which is a classic look, but it ain't sexy.  there's xenomorphs, which is probably the first alien monster that comes to mind for teratophiles like us. but for that very reason i deliberately wanted to make my design very different from a xenomorph - i didn't want it to seem derivative. there's tons of aliens in movies like star wars and games like mass effect, but that doesn't make it easier to define why their designs read as 'alien.' imagine a turian, quarian, twi'lek, or mon calamari dressed in medieval clothes instead of space suits, strolling through a cobblestoned village rather than the corridors of a spaceship. they could easily read as standard fantasy monsters rather than anything from a galaxy far, far away. in fact, the same goes for the xenomorph--imagine it with a bit more dust, ashes, and tattered rags, and you might as well make it the big bad of a victorian horror story.

by this point it seems that it's really the setting, props, and aesthetic that you 'dress' the monster in that make all the difference. the aforementioned races read as alien because they're part of sci-fi stories that take place in sci-fi settings, full of sci-fi trappings, tropes, and tools. they are surrounded by advanced technology, laser guns, space chess, and holograms; they dress in space armour or clothing that is sleek and futuristic; they use hover cars and space ships to travel between a multitude of different planets. 

imagine stripping all that away and replacing it with swords, bows, doublets, hoop skirts, horse carriages, stone castellos, parchment, and grimy little villages. now all of a sudden you have a textbook eurocentric medieval fantasy setting populated by monsters instead, and if you didn't know they were originally aliens you'd probably never think they looked out of place.

of course, the reverse also holds true. the demons that plague our medieval fantasy story could easily become aliens if we plop them down on a space cruiser, dress them like intergalactic bounty hunters, and arm them with high tech weaponry. in conclusion, the identification of many monsters as this or that 'type' depends so much on the genre of the story they're part of and the aesthetic of the world they live in.

realising that was freeing, because it made me feel like i didn't need to obsess too much about drawing a 'textbook' alien--since there really is no such thing. after this borderline philosophical train of thought i went full circle and returned to my original viewpoint: with alien designs being so diverse there's no right or wrong, so i could do whatever i wanted with this design.

that said, i still wanted them to read as something out of this world rather than look too 'earthly,' familiar, or 'natural.'  in no special order, here are the traits i ended up incorporating into the final design, to make them look more alien:

the silhouette of their head should be odd, and they should lack a conventional face. they do have a mouth, but otherwise lack the features we expect to see in a face -- eyes, a nose, and ears. replacing something expected with something else entirely, or nothing at all, immediately makes a design seem more strange and mystical, such as when you give a four-legged monster hands instead of front paws, or flip the mouth of a human face 90 degrees. the shape of their skull looks humanoid, but instead of hair they have a crest that makes their outline look more unique.

their upper half is humanoid, but some of the proportions are different from human conventions: their arms look a bit too thick and heavy, and their neck is a bit too long. many alien designs in popular media are humanoid but with strange proportions, making them simultaneously familiar and uncanny (for example the kaminoans of star wars). they had legs in my first concept sketches, but it looked a bit too 'normal.' i wanted to give them a stranger type of anatomy, so i came to think of tentacles. i realise it gives them some merperson vibes, but i don't think that's a problem. however, in an effort to make it look less like regular octopus tentacles i didn't include any suction cups and they're smoother, fleshier, and more stiff. i also made them look a bit 'segmented,' in a way that brings machines and/or insects to mind. 

to make their silhouette look even more otherworldly i drew inspiration from blue sea slugs, which honestly looks like something alien living right here on earth. specifically, they inspired the two pairs of 'wings' or 'fins' (or whatever you want to call them) that i attached to my monster's shoulders and hips. our alien moves in a floating, weightless manner, as if they are swimming through the air (or whatever substance they're moving through). but the 'wings' aren't only for locomotion -- i'm sure they serve some cool sci-fi function that i'm just not knowledgeable enough to technobabble about, hah. maybe they're basically satellite disks for transmitting or downloading data, or messages sent by their brethren, or they're for detecting and reading light and sounds and other sensory impressions in ways far beyond what human senses would allow. neat stuff like that.

all that aside, the aesthetic purpose of the 'fins' was to make their outline look more interesting, especially in combination with the tentacly lower half. perhaps it makes them look a little bit angelic, but i don't think that's an issue either. old school angels are eldritch and weird as fuck, so the association doesn't go against their alien nature, in my opinion. that's also why i included a favourite design feature of mine, that i adore to add especially to where it doesn't belong: a halo.

the colour scheme is, quite simply, a palette i've wanted to use for a while, and now felt like a good time. the bright red makes a cool contrast against the dark greens, and the lines of red create the impression of segments and plates in a way that resembles armour, a machine, and/or an insectoid exoskeleton. it makes their body look relatively inorganic, almost robotic.

the funny thing is that with only the tentacles they might have looked more like a merperson, and with only the 'wings' they could have seemed more like an angel, and with only the segmented body you might have thought they were a robot. but with both the tentacles and the 'wings' and the segmented tentacles they don't look like either -- they look like something different. in any case, the fleshy 'spikes' of the fins mirror the tentacles, which in turn mirror the tentacle dicks, so it's a recurring shape that makes the design look more coherent.

last but not least they're definitely gender non-conforming, in the sense that their species have a completely different notion of gender than humans have had through most of our history. because bold of us to ever assume aliens from the endless expanse of space have the same outdated ideas of gender and sex as the inhabitants of a pale blue dot in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, right? in an effort to prevent people from reading them as exclusively masc or femme, i paired wide, square shoulders with a thin waist and wide, round hips. i also like to imagine them speaking with many voices in unison, but with their 'primary' voice resembling gillian anderson (which is hilarious, because ... x-files ...). 

if you have any further questions about this design, just comment below <3

// art + character © me.