Greetings, artists from all worlds and all realities!
Today, I thought I'd share with you the project I've had going on in the back of my head for a while now. I hope you like it!
The following images were made using my custom build of Disco Diffusion, photo-manipulation and digital drawing through Gimp and Inkscape, and post editing/composition in darktable.
Check out my Instagram for more!
The project:
The creatures I'm making these days belong to 3 different "races", or morphological, cultural, spiritual, psychological and social groups that are part of a universe I am currently trying to create. A lot of short stories I've written in the past also take place in this world.
I haven't decided on a final "format", deliverable that this project should have, and why should it have something specific? Cross-media might be exactly the way to go after all!
By trade, I'm a musician, music composer and music producer. Adding visuals to pieces of music that are following a theme -these universe I'm creating- sounds like a lot of fun. But collaborating with other artists to provide short stories, little animations, comics, etc... all fitting in this universe sounds like ever more goodness to me.
This creature is part of the first race, and I'm yet to decide on a name for them.
The Sleepers, the Thesians, I have a list on my computer of potential names (and their reasons/origins), but that's probably something I can work out later.
They are organic, usually incorporating elements such as plants, rocks, trees, water, bones, etc... And are nicknamed "sleepers" by the other races, as they literally just "woke up" and came to existence recently, in the historical lore.
It's more work than I thought, but it's good work.
For now, most of what I do (when I'm not working or studying) is to write down some lore, create some cultural richness to each race, as well as their metaphysical "purpose", their reason to be, what they represent, as this universe is closely related to my field of studies (philosophy) which I want to incorporate into a scifi universe.
Not even talking about writing down a red-ribbon, or a storyline, but just making the existence of each race coherent and consistent is my first priority. Once they fully justify themselves in the universe I created by what they represent, I can start to work on isolated things and individual elements such as characters, plots, relations, physical appearances of other things, etc.
In the next post, I'll introduce you to the second race,
And give you a small update or where I'm at with the creation process. If I try anything new while creating these portraits, I will of course also share my workflow with you, along with some screenshots to illustrate it from beginning to end better, to document it a bit better.
I hope I didn't bore you with all all of this, I know this post is less about the art itself and more about what I see in it, but at least you have some insights on the how and why now.