"Life is beautiful. In every sense. In all of its forms. Can't tell you if that's a universal fact or just my pretentious personal statement. In less than a month we'll all be dead. It's purely a fact this time. Nothing personal. My private thoughts revolve around impossible miracles and salvation fantasies. The imminent death doesn't feel real inside our bubble stuck halfway between home and the new frontier. I'll just keep analyzing and editing the footage and photographs from THIOTOT 23X. I'll do it till the end. Or maybe, forever. From the mental place, I'm in these days, my whole existence feels like a long jump from the void to nothingness."
(Dr. Palmira M. Daramann 03.02.2143 - 13.05.2177)
" I mean, isn't that beautiful? A probably long-gone creature from another world is performing a prolonged jump right in front of my eyes. It took me the whole night to find the missing frames. Then I had to clean the images and put them in order. It feels like I resurrected something here."
Doctor Mirilian S. Bugatchev. Arghadville on Mars - 01.01. 2263.
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"Picture EGZO - a-at 37/1000111 - 1F313Y. A long-necked, two-legged animal with rudimentary wings unfit to flight or gliding that we have seen many times displaying a degree of intelligence comparable to primitive small primates is following a prolonged jump aided by what looks like wings or ears, of a much smaller creature that the team of scientists of the 2169 expedition observed for the first time on this occasion. The nature of the light-producing organs that look like shiny eyes on this, and many other animals we observed through the work of the brave team on the planet THIOTOT 23X, is still a mystery to us just like it was to them." (From the MCBR archives, Arghadville on Mars)
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Just like I said in the first, kind of pilot episode of this series, In the period between 2014 and 2017, I created a large collection of artworks using a compilation technique I developed along the way. Since the process was thoroughly explained in the previous episode, I won't be repeating that stuff here or in any of the future episodes, but ...
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... but I will show you some of the phases that brought me to the final result.
This macro detail of a coastal rock was used as the landscape at the base of the artwork.
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The bigger of the two animals ...
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... was then inserted into that imaginary landscape ...
... and the smaller creature followed soon after.
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While the bigger animal was completely created as one single drawing, this smaller one was wingless at first, and then I used a fragment from another drawing to give it the final shape seen in the EGZO - a-at 37/1000111 - 1F313Y picture.
Here you can see the drawing I used for the wings. Or ears. Or whatever those things are.
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With both creatures in the picture, it was time to add a bit of earthy, washed-out colors to the scene.
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Earlier I said I wouldn't repeat the things explained in the previous episode but the following photographs wouldn't make much sense without that explanation so I'm ready to change my mind now.
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I drew the alien fauna on office paper, and then cut - out those drawings & attached them to a larger piece of paper. Prepared that way, the drawings were hung from the pendant light on the ceiling. With that done it was time to photograph them after illuminating the whole arrangement with a desk lamp. To attach the cut-out drawing to the larger paper I used my saliva. I drank a lot of Coca-Cola in those days because that famous drink can make your saliva abundant and sticky as hell. The pale stains in the above photograph are places where the natural, organic glue still hasn't dried.
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I photographed each drawing in a few different ways. In this shot, for example, you can see how the angle from which the thing was photographed made the body of the creature look bigger. In the following photograph ...
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... the head is more prominent and definitively bigger.
Here you can see a slightly different version of the smaller animal. I mean, of the original, wingless creature, before adding a fragment from another drawing.
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Here you can see two winged versions that I haven't used in the final artwork, the EGZO - a-at 37/1000111 - 1F313Y picture.
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And that's it. The following link will take you to the previous episode if you wish to go there and see how things started and who the heck is Doctor Mirilian S. Bugatchev.
@borjan/alien-wildlife-chronicles-episode-1
AS ALWAYS HERE ON HIVE, ALL THE ARTWORKS, THE DRAWINGS, THE OPENING ANIMATED GIF, AND THE PHOTOGRAPHS, ALONG WITH THE SHORT SCY FY STORY, ARE IN ALL SEGMENTS, MY CREATIONS.
Borjan Radolovich, @borjan here on Hive - the author of this post. Medulin on Earth, 23.08. 2023.