Afternoon Sketches

a little fan art lagi from panzer dragoon orta

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.

I usually don't reblog stuff to this blog but this feels relevant to my project and I'd like to share. The link is broken but if found a good website with excerpt from it : https://www.urticator.net/essay/0/19.html

look, I know I've talked about this essay (?) before but like,

If you ever needed a good demonstration of the quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", have I got an exercise for you.

Somebody made a small article explaining the basics of atomic theory but it's written in Anglish. Anglish is basically a made-up version of English where they remove any elements (words, prefixes, etc) that were originally borrowed from romance languages like french and latin, as well as greek and other foreign loanwords, keeping only those of germanic origin.

What happens is an english which is for the most part intelligible, but since a lot everyday english, and especially the scientific vocabulary, has has heavy latin and greek influence, they have to make up new words from the existing germanic-english vocabulary. For me it kind of reads super viking-ey.

Anyway when you read this article on atomic theory, in Anglish called Uncleftish Beholding, you get this text which kind of reads like a fantasy novel. Like in my mind it feels like it recontextualizes advanced scientific concepts to explain it to a viking audience from ancient times.

Even though you're familiar with the scientific ideas, because it bypasses the normal language we use for these concepts, you get a chance to examine these ideas as if you were a visitor from another civilization - and guess what, it does feel like it's about magic. It has a mythical quality to it, like it feels like a book about magic written during viking times. For me this has the same vibe as reading deep magic lore from a Robert Jordan book.

Finally finished this, some constructs

I refer to sapient/sentient machines in my setting as constructs partially because the term AI is really broad and can apply to a lot of different type of synthetic forms of life/existences. So to keep it simple all constructs are AI but not all AIs are constructs.

These two are some typical designs among CSG/Human (left) and Brakken (right) constructs. The first is a mobile assistant, a type of specialist construct that is meant to go places where an AI network can't while the other is a Brakken mother unit. The majority of human civilization is governed by the CSG, central service grid a vast AI network that manages all aspects of human civilization. They've governed earth and its many colonies for a very long time and most people under their care life relatively safe, post-scarcity lives. All the CSG has historically had problems with control and governing overreach.

The brakken are eusocial aliens who have a queen. The queens primary role is to produce new members for the colony, provide generation knowledge, and support colony cohesion via the psychoactive pheromones she produces. When the queen dies, a whole is left in the colony and in some instances another queen is unable to take her place. Sometimes colonies can reject the queen. Mother units are essentially bio computers which take on the role of a queen of a colony when needed.

More shading practice , this time a dragon rider. I haven’t drawn a dragon in quite some time.

Slowly working on developing some aliens for a extra-firm scifi setting. These guys are the brakken (wip name). They were uplifted by another alien race and evolved from a species which originally had radial symmetry. I took some inspiration for their colors from manuls.

Learning to draw mechanical things, decided to make some cyborgs. They have literal face masks, its more of a stylistic choice on their part

just another batch of sketches, i haven't worked traditionally in a while, so have a messy doodle

I decided to color this really old piece of lineart, from like years ago. Might work on it a bit more in the future, or maybe not but either way, I'm done messing with it for now.

A purple space dragon partially inspired by sea-slugs. I wanted to get some more practice using colors Ii don’t normally use.