cmkosemen

"Tila" aliens from Robert Reed's "Great Ship" universe

Added 2025-06-07 14:06:45 +0000 UTC

My illustration of the "Tila" species from Robert Reed's "Great Ship" universe -one of the many I have contributed for this setting.

Descriptions of this species included gruesome bits of cosmetic surgery, detailed as follows:

Little surgeries and large ones had radically changed her body and limbs. Extra joints in the arms allowed her to make convincing Tilan gesture. Her skull had been crushed in artful lines and then healed inside special containers, forcing it into a wide oval shape. She stopped growing hair of any kind, and her feet were longer and much narrower.

Here is my initial study for this species:

I later refined this into line-art.

Here is the raw, pre-scan line-art of my Tila alien. From this step, you can glean some tips and tricks about my creature art process:

Draw faces, heads, or other "focal parts" of the anatomy in larger scale, and are later shrink and collage them into the final drawing. This ensures greater resolution & detail in the final rendition.
Draw shadows, fabric creases, etc. separately and composite them into the final drawing.
Start drawing on a simple sheet of printer paper, and paste bits and grow your drawing as it evolves. At the end of the day, all you need to do is to get the black-and-white art onto the scanner plate.
There is no "right tool" for drawing. If you look closely, you can notice that I used ink nibs, art pens, and regular ballpoint pens in different areas of the illustration.
And most importantly... have fun! Turn accidents into features. An accidental ink blot on the right side of the creature's head risked spoiling its symmetry. Instead of correcting it, I turned the ink blot into a weirdly-placed ear, and ended up with my Tila possessing asymmetrical ear-holes, like those of an owl.

It was also hinted that the Tila could see strange visual quantum effects on the edge of the light spectrum:

...The Tila possessed a keen sense of vision, but when they looked at any surface, particularly along the edge, they saw a thin gray aura that glimmered and endlessly changed shape. The aura might be meaningless noise precipitated by quantum imprecisions, but the Tila considered it to be quite a lot more -- the most authentic glimpse into the deepest, strangest workings of the universe.

Accordingly, I painted their eyes with highlights in counter-intuitive colours. By the way, this subtle technique is great at making flat line art look "alive" and moving.