Apparently I liked that creature on yesterday’s sketch page because here it is again.
Also on the page is Mara Winikat making faces. One of my practices is to run character through their emotional paces. I often present them expressing extreme emotions because
A) Extreme emotions are fun to draw
B) How the character expresses those emotions says a lot about the character. Some of the character that live in my head don’t exhibit emotions loudly. Others couldn’t be subtle to save their lives.
Hopefully by now King Roach is easy to identify. The rest of the creatures on the page are various possible adversaries. At the bottom, on the left is the freak creature. On the right is the samurai thing.
Not sure who the noseless guy is. I must have just been inventing him as I sketched since I can’t identify him. The KR adversaries that I’ve put thought in to are always recognizable to me when I see them again. I can’t say I remember the details of their stories but I do remember that they had stories.
H.P. Lovecraft created the Elder Things in his short novel At the Mountains of Madness. They were/are an alien race that colonized the Earth millions of years before Man. Based on human interpretations of their hieroglyphs the Elder Things might have created life on this planet. They might even have evolved humanity as a slave species. While on Earth they co-existed (and warred) with other intelligent alien species. Eventually they fell into decline, eventually becoming almost extinct on this planet.
The Elder Things came from another world. They evolved somewhere, they had a native biosphere. These two critters are attempts to imagine what other creatures might have lived on that home world.
The portrait of the woman done in colored pencils is probably just me playing around with my tools. I don’t recognize her as a character in any stories.
The rest of the page is dedicated to sketches of one of the survivors of the empire I mentioned yesterday. A finished portrait can be found here.
Part of the background for the King Roach series (at least in the version in this 2003 sketchbook) is ancient, lost empire. History has forgotten it. It was powerful and, basically, fundamentally, corrupt and evil. It had the sort of advanced technology that looks like magic to pre-industrial cultures. Tiny pockets of tech staffed by former citizens of the empire (kept in stasis) lay hidden in unexplored pockets of the world. Woe to anyone who pokes about in those pockets.
Here we have a variety of supporting characters for the King Roach series. This version of the series is set in the Sentient 39 universe. The technology of the society is about the level of 1950s Earth. There are finished versions of some of these characters in my Epilogue.net gallery.
The trapweaver is one of the “lower” species in the plant/animal symbiotic biosphere. Trapweavers live in small colonies of about a dozen individuals. They weave elaborate structures from the grasses of the great plains. When prey animals enter these structures the weavers work together to pull the structures down, entangling the prey. The weavers then stab the prey to death with their sharp beaks.
The void opal is a precious gem that forms in space. (The words “void opal” and the image of a shining, multicolored gem came to me at the same time. Void opal. I love the sound those words make.)
Another image from that hypothetical Sentient 39 encyclopedia. This is one of those species I’ve never gotten around to naming. It comes from a biosphere where plants and animals have developed a direct symbiotic relationship. Most animals species have plants that grow directly out of their bodies. The plants act as part of their digestive system. The plant is also part of the animal’s reproductive system (as the animal is part of the plant’s). The creature depicted here is a member of the “dominant” species of the world, that is, it’s a civilization builder.
When I design a character I try to make him/her distinct enough that he/she could be recognizable if depicted naked with a shaved head. I probably only succeed to the degree that I can recognize the characters when I encounter them again.
One of these days I want to put together an encyclopedia for the Sentient 39 “universe”. I’ve had this idea on and off for years. I’ll do an illustration or two and then get distracted. I know this fellow was intended for an encyclopedia entry but I no longer remember if he was to have individual entry or if he was an example of one of the many off branches of humanity.
