NEW ALIEN AGAIN! This one I wanted to stick to being more Earth inspired, connecting with my roots. I'm calling 'em Styraphants cause they're mostly a mix of styracosaurus, elephant, and mollusk of course. Trying to make a quad walking sophont always lends to kind of a centaur-ish body plan, so tried to think outside the box for appendages this go around. They've got a pair of trunk tentacles around their mouth that they use as their hands, which have a fleshy 'zipper' to slot together at rest. They also smell/taste with them so gloves are a very popular purchase.
Oh also! Their eyes are on little stalks that peak out around their frill, they can hide them away if scared. Also all the fellas pictured here are gals! They have a male/female system in keeping with the Earthling megafauna theme.
In celebration of Alien Day, Fright-Rags has resurrected Kyle Crawford's Jonesy shirt. It's available for $25 today only and will ship the week of May 17.
part of the fun of the original alien is the horror of the nostromo itself imo. it’s a cell of corporate greed ferrying narrowly-trained workers across barren space. it’s huge and yet claustrophobic, cockpits crammed with machinery giving way to yawning berths dripping chains and water. the supercomputer is named mother in a stroke of human anthropomorphization, but instead of providing comfort or protection, it’s only a courier between its creator and its wailing brood. ripley yells “mother! mother!” at a matronly-voiced computer that speaks calmly over her helplessness. the ship is full of endless details and patterns and unlabeled buttons and dials the audience can’t entirely make sense of; to do anything on the ship is a rigorous, technical process, and we must depend on the characters to know it. the internal mechanics of the ship are so alien that a literal alien can hide among the bits and bobs and not be noticed. it’s great.
Cutting it close, but here's my entries for the Refugium Creature Design Contest! @simon-roy
The rasparoos are large dog-sized herbivores who leap in family groups along rolling temperate lichenfields, using grazing mandibles to scrape lichens off of rocky surfaces. During the fall season, they fatten up on sugary fermented “honey”-filled pinwheels produced in hives in their territory, obtained by breaking in with their claws and using a long prehensile radula to reach inside, to hibernate in the winter. They fight fiercely to protect these against rival rasparoo family groups. They fight with their clawed forearms, along with their more powerful hind-claws by leaning upright on their stiff tails.
Honey rings are social pinewheels that live in nests as colonies in temperate lichenfields. Their caste system includes workers, the smaller motile form who go out of the colony to collect vegetable matter during warmer seasons to ferment in their stomach acids and store as “honey” in the hive for the snowy seasons. The other caste are the reservoirs, who are blind, sessile and much larger than workers, with characteristic spiral body cavities to store a maximum amount of “honey”. Some of it seeps out of their bodies to stick with one another securely in the hive, aided by their gripping legs clinging to the walls of the hive.
I had a lot of fun with these guys! You can see concept sketches here because I think they're fun.
Cavity Colors has an Alien design by Dismay Design available on T-shirts ($30), long sleeves ($40), and zip-up hoodies ($50) until Monday, April 29, at 1pm EST. They'll ship the week of May 31.