My Projects - Blog Posts

Update #3

It's assembled, I'll need to hit a dollar store to see if they have a fake axe, if not, I'll go to Target or a prop/costume store

I forgot to take a before picture, but here's a bit of progress of me repainting my off brand nerf shotgun... Cuz I want to make me a shotgun axe

Currently I'm making the metallic color lighter

It's not going to be fully accurate, but who cares, it's going to be cool as fuck

Update #2

The cap is now shiny, I couldn't paint the orange part since the paint will keep scraping off, I'll be able to assemble what I have later today

I forgot to take a before picture, but here's a bit of progress of me repainting my off brand nerf shotgun... Cuz I want to make me a shotgun axe

Currently I'm making the metallic color lighter

It's not going to be fully accurate, but who cares, it's going to be cool as fuck

Update:

✨shiny✨

I forgot to take a before picture, but here's a bit of progress of me repainting my off brand nerf shotgun... Cuz I want to make me a shotgun axe

Currently I'm making the metallic color lighter

It's not going to be fully accurate, but who cares, it's going to be cool as fuck

I forgot to take a before picture, but here's a bit of progress of me repainting my off brand nerf shotgun... Cuz I want to make me a shotgun axe

Currently I'm making the metallic color lighter

It's not going to be fully accurate, but who cares, it's going to be cool as fuck

posting this at long last 🙃

this took me WAY too much time but I wanted to experiment with new techniques and brushes

t'was fun (except for the mandatory mid-process crisis)

Another human as I put off the dread of having to draw a Formid not in side on perspective

First regular human character

Pretty basic question but ah well- are the faeries aliens? Or seed world organisms that originated from earth?

The faeries, slaters and formids are all aliens, however the slaters are from an ancient seedworld/colony world of a now extinct alien.

Absolutely speedran this one (how the hell are feathers less of a pain in the neck than a front-facing perspective?)

Four months later and I’ve finally finished the next character, and the first non-human.

The flag of the Faerie Revolutionary Alliance, the first of many resistance and revolutionary movements to collaborated with the Allies during the Faerie War to overthrow the Faerie Empire (names are a work in progress, I know that’s a lot of faeries). The war hammer represents what was seen as a “people’s weapon” due to needing little metal, the tree represents the home trees many faeries build/built their civilisations in.

Perspective is pain

Cart :3

Eight detonations toll like bells as the leviathan finally fell still. Behind it, the hulking mass of the vessel split like a maw, mechanical arms grasping desperately like pharyngeal jaws attempting to stuff the corpse down its gullet. Lifeless eyes that had seen the passing of near a century slip above the surface a final time as it is dragged into the metal cavern under the unseeing gaze of its kin.

As the soulless beast of steel snags upon the pier the mighty corpse is hauled from the gloom into air choked with smog and the roars of flame. Its fat feeds the furnaces, it’s flesh fuels the half starved skeletons that scamper beneath the showers of sparks and screaming metal, over watched by stone faced enforcers and bent to the whim of the monsters that lurk in dens gilded with gold far beyond the land scarred with soot they use to line their pockets.

To compare those lords of depravity to the dutiful guild of scavengers, to the ever inventive legions of parasites or the humble handiwork of plagues would be a disservice to these pillars of nature’s establishment. They are a cancer, a corrupting rot spawned from a broken system, a self perpetuating scourge that bloats and grows as it draws the life from all that surround it until the entire house of cards collapses under their weight. This is not survival of the fittest, nature red in tooth and claw, not pulling yourself up by the bootstraps nor the mandate proclaimed by some long dead god. It is a death cult, an ouroboros swallowing itself until the bloated head chokes on the famined tail, a self fulfilling prophecy of destruction doomed to fall.

But when the ash and dust have settled, the countless cohorts of creeping things have worked their time honoured role, when the unrelenting tides of time have weathered steel and skeleton alike, these kleptocratic kings of ruin will lie forgotten, merely another scar among the countless upon the Earth, the graves upon which they had built their foundations finally finding closure beneath silt and soil as the chorus of life sings on without them.

-bit of a vent post to try and deal with whatever the deep fried fuck is happening to the world rn

Great burgundy flag-goose

The great burgundy flag-goose is part of a clade of grazing tapajarids originating in the eastern continent of the known world and spreading across the planet. Exploiting the now vacant niche of large terrestrial herbivore following the most recent mass extinction, the clade moved from omnivores and frugivores into bulk feeders, evolving into both the heaviest flying pterosaurs of Feorrlund and into a flightless clade. The flag-geese is a polyphyletic grouping of basal members, with Odontorostruvexilla and its relative evolving a cropping beak and psuedoteeth to feed on a variety of grasses, migrating between feeding grounds in vast flocks. Although never domesticated, their seasonal abundance plays a crucial role in a variety of cultures across multiple sophonts.

Jäegers

The jägers are a clade of terrestrial, predatory fantails native to Crescentia, although some species (primarily jaegerdrossel) can be found in Omnedomum. The most basal jägers are the aforementioned jagerdrossel, thrush-like predators that supplement their diet of large invertebrates with songbirds and small lizards. More derived are the harrierhens, filling niches akin to Terran foxes, but most cases maintaining the ability to fly, with one species having reached the tropical rainforests of Omnedomum and with others filling the niche of apex predator on many islands in the T-SIC (Trans-Straits Island Chain). Despite their continued success, their diversity in recent millennia has decreased due to competition with the more robust larklynx. Finally are the typical jägers, including groups such as the phoros, jägerhirsch and mohawks, the latter two having evolved keratinous spurs amongst for intraspecies fights amongst males. These birds are medium to large pursuit hunters, chasing flocks of fanfowl, rheapidura and other ground birds, typically avoiding the sturdier iguanas.

The lunar harrierhen is the most basal representative of an extremely successful group of jägers, the fowks. These nocturnal predators hunt a variety of lizards, birds and large invertebrates. The lunar harrierhen in particular is native to much of southern crescentia, being especially prevalent in the fog forests in the eastern side of the Boss range, stalking the forest floors from the setting of the sun till it flutters up to rest in the canopy come the break of dawn.

The konigsjager is another denizens of these woodlands. Unlike most other jagerhirsch, this titanic avian is not a swift pursuit predator, but a powerful ambush hunter, specialising in the large iguanas dwelling amidst the fog. These giants have only recently claimed their title, having evolved from a fairly typical lithe jäger less than 2 million years ago, dwelling to its great size in the absence of the predatory iguanas to the north and a population crash of the local macropredatory larklynx following an outbreak of a transmissible cancer similar to that which decimated the Tasmanian devils of earth.

A rare visitor to these cramped forests, the fire-crested mohawk is a classic example of a typical jäger. Patrolling the highland grasslands and open woodland of the Boss range, they form fission-fusion packs to pursue the swift grazing birds that feed upon the herbs, grasses and heaths. During spring the males group into leks and compete for females attention, singing and flashing their bright red crests and, if a winner cannot be decided by looks alone, coming to blows with talons and spurs.

The western scaly-shouldered jagerdrossel is a member of a species complex encircling the Boss range. Fairly large for a jagerdrossel, these birds hunt songbirds and large invertebrates amongst the undergrowth and branches, pursuing their prey on foot or chasing them in rapid bursts of flight, subduing prey with swift pecks from a hooked bill and stabs from an enlarged second toe.

Pasodau is a seedworld established alongside its sister world Snekens in the far future to study the dynamics of evolution without the intervention of sophonts, recalling the numerous worlds established by the Old Ones in time immemorial.

The affair of seeding, as is typical of Terran lead terraforming, was a chaotic undertaking of measures and countermeasures to establish a sustainable atmosphere and biosphere, a process born from the frantic attempts at stabilising the fragile, almost mono cultural terraformed worlds established by Terran factions following a number of narrowly avoided and even total ecological collapses leaving thousands dead and millions displaced. Whilst successful at preventing such planetfalls through redundancies and diversity, this method of seeding a world makes determining the full list of species introduced near impossible due to many extinctions, failed introductions, hybridisations and genetic modifications that occur at a species, genus or even family level amongst microfauna and flora. The list of species that are larger, more distinct, or introduced later in the process is much more complete, with all vertebrates seeded being recorded.

The map above shows the planet at the time of seeding.

A world of ghosts

Deep beneath sun and soil they lie, compressed between strata like a flower pressed within a book. Mineral echoes of beings that had perished in time immemorial, mimics of stone crafted in remembrance of the majesty each colosal femur and the intricate filaments of each tiny feather, eulogies to the gods of old who’s true remains have long since been reduced to nothingness, every treasure telling the story of a life long extinguished.

Upon the soil where they rest, the living still sing of those left behind. Menacing thorns and colossal fruits tell tales of ancient behemoths whose bellows and roars once filled now empty forests, viscous horns and nimble hooves speak of predators that now hunt only in nightmares, pointless flowers mourn silent wings with tapestries of colour and abstract portraits.

Artefacts too recall the years near forgotten. Spear points dredged by unsuspecting trawlers recite ballads of those ancient hands napping flints in a sunken world, clays and charcoal adorning cave and crag echo those lost beasts of yore and the equally forgotten hands that depicted them, potsherds and rubble mark the graves of empires once thought immortal.

Countless stories of those that came before surround us in our world of ghosts, a transient beauty, a great tapestry that will stretch from the sweltering forge of its birth to the cleansing flames of its destruction, and a story we all shall one day join.

Finally finished the most commonly found sophonts on mars (and those with main characters in the comic I’m planning). Gonna finish the character reference sheets now

Some slater anatomy

Respiratory system in blue, digestive system in green, and skeleton in red

Slaters

Common names in English:

Isopods, rolley pollies, webspinners, weavers, long spiders

Binomial name:

Sericutextor Sp. (Silk weavers)

Description:

Slaters are a genus of dodecapodal alien sophonts and were a founding member of the USS.

They posses an exoskeleton composed of a mineralised core covered in a layer of organic polymers, consisting of a tegus and a sternum. The body is divided into four tagma: the head, the neck, the body and the abdomen. The head consists of a single plate and possesses three pairs of eyes, two pairs of antennae, three pairs of external jaws and a pair of cephalic limbs. One pair of antennae act as chemoreceptors, audio receptors and to detect gravity, whilst the other pair bear a semaphore-like structure used in communication. Of the three pairs of external jaws, one pair act as pincers and food manipulators, whilst the other two act as both a seal to the oral cavity and as masticators. An additional pair of heavily derived internal jaws separate the oral cavity from the rest of the digestive tract. Lastly, the cephalic limbs posses two manipulators digits and two specialised for silk production. The neck is divided into three segments, the first segment bearing no limbs and allowing greater flexibility of the head whilst the latter two each possesses a pamprodactyl hand. The body is made up of six segments, each bearing a limb with a anisodactyl foot, with each appendage being able to act as a manipulator, especially those of the front segment, however typically they are relegated to locomotion. Finally, the abdomen is also made up of six segments, with the final segment bearing a pair of spinnerets whilst all other segments are limbless.

The respiratory system is made up of two booklungs within the abdomen and a series of spiracles between each segment, linked by a pair of trachea. The circulatory system is centred around two major hearts, one at the rear of the abdomen and one at the base of the neck.

Slaters are capable of producing organic fibres often referred to as silk,and posses silk glands on their cephalic limbs, their manipulatory limbs and their spinnerets. The most complex silk strands are produced by the cephalic limbs, the spinnerets can produce the most durable silk, and the manipulatory limbs produce the most simple silk. The adhesiveness, tensile strength and other factors of the silk produced can be controlled by the skaters.

Slaters have a bisex system, with the primary differences being in sephamore colours, pheromones and social cues, and whilst there is a slight weighting of mass and colour (males on average being slightly paler and lighter) there is significant overlap. They are also bidirectionally dichogamus, naturally undergoing the process when exposed to certain environmental, social or chemical stimuli. In the modern day many slaters use artificial methods to at least kickstart transition, as this is typically swifter and causes less inconvenience.

Between two and eight eggs are laid within an ootheca weaved from silk similar to that used to package faeces. After about a month, these eggs hatch into small, soft larvae, which grow for two years before their exoskeleton begins to harden, with adulthood being reached at about eighteen years old.

Ancestrally, slaters lived in large, communal burrow networks and above ground structures made from wood, silk and soil. Due to these fossorial habits their fore and ventral eyes are quite shortsighted, with their dorsal eyes providing a wild field of vision but poor depth reception.

The modern genus of slaters is thought to have evolved 2-3 million years ago. Due to their subterranean nature, they gained a familiarity with metallurgy and fossil fuels much earlier in their history than most other sophonts. This lead to a comparatively rapid technological development, allowing them to have the longest continuous spacefaring history of any extant sophont. They were also the founding members of the precursor to the USS after making contact with two other homeworlds before the beginning of the Great War. Following the establishment of communication with terrans and formids and the end of the war, they assisted in the founding of the USS.

Finally finished the most widely used Formid writing system. Be been working on the numbers for months now, and the alphabet for the past couple days.

At some point I’d like to make a conlang for it, but if I did that rn I would genuinely explode

(Also sorry the formatting is a tad shite, this has all been transcribed from a very messy stack of paper)

Just need to finish the write up for one more sophont and I’ll have finished all the ones with main character rep, then it’s on to character design

Some faerie anatomy sketches, including a distant ancestor

Faeries

Common names in English:

Kites, gulls, imps

Binomial name:

Fantispiritus Sp. (Fated spirits)

Description:

Faeries are a genus of volant, bipedal hexapods who were the instigators of the Great War and the second alien sophont encountered by Terrans.

They posses a mineralised endoskeleton throughout their body, in addition to a mineralised cranial exoskeleton covered in a layer of organic polymers. They posses a dorsal notochord within a vertebrae-like structure, with a series of overlapping internal plates filling a role similar to the belly ribs of some earth tetrapods. The four thoracic limb bones are derived from two parallel rods of bone, leading to each limb segment possessing two long bones akin to those of the tetrapod radius, ulna, tibia and fibula, with the forelimbs possessing two segments and the hind limbs possessing three segments. Each long bone in the upper segments are connected to the a scapula-like structure with a ball and socket joint, with the two bones for the forelimbs fusing into a disc for increased rotational flexibility. Each limb possesses five fingers, with the outer rear digit bearing a wing in both the fore and hind limbs.

The head possesses a bony crest, a pair of cephalic limbs, two lower jaws fused into a single structure, and two inner jaws. The cephalic limbs posses two main limb segments and the hands possessing four segments.

After being processed in the jaws, food passes down the oesophagus either into a crop-like structure or into a gizzard before continuing on to the stomach. Meanwhile, air enters the parallel respiratory tracts either through external nostrils between the plates of the skull or through internal airways in the roof of the mouth, entering an air sac in the back of the skull before continuing into a pair of lungs within the thorax.

The faerie circulatory system bears general similarities to those of Terran vertebrates and cephalopods, with a heart adjacent to each lung and a larger central heart located between the two longs pumping their haemocyanin blood around their body.

Faeries feel little to no effect from ethanol and some other simple alcohols due to early life of their planet utilising this byproduct of their aerobic respiration as a defence mechanism against other organisms.

Faeries have a bisex system similar to that of Terran vertebrates, with males (tercels) typically being smaller and lighter built, with red skull plates, blue head and eye crests, and red and blue tail veins, whilst females (formels) are typically larger and bulkier, with orange skull plates, purple head and eye crests, and black and lilac tail veins, however there is large individual and population variation.

Between one and five leathery eggs may be laid, which hatch into fuzzy, clumsy eyasm after roughly fifteen Terran weeks. After a year of bulking up, eyasm rapidly develop into volant flaplings, loosing much of their down and becoming much more active and curious. Infancy is considered to end after a year as a flapling, gradually developing both physically and mentally until adulthood, typically considered at sixteen years old.

Ancestrally faeries lived in arboreal communities heavily dependant on a symbiotic xerophyte, with those living in more forested habitats typically living in sprawling, low density and interconnected groups, whilst those in open environments tending to live in high density, isolated communities within stands of trees.

Fantispiritus is generally considered to have evolved three to four million years ago, with the modern species having reached a global distribution by roughly half a million years ago. Shortly after venturing beyond their home solar system, an extremist faction originating on one of their home planet’s moons attempted to seize control over the other faerie factions. Whilst this control was often tenuous over much of the homeworld, it was absolute across the vast majority of faerie space. Following an expansionist policy and a number of attempted coups and civil wars, they came into contact with a lose assemblage of alien sophonts which made up the precursor to the USS. A rapid first strike was carried out that started the Great War, leading to sweeping short term advances and the threatening of multiple homeworlds before forces could be rallied against them. Shortly before the peak of this offensive, accidental contact had been made with the Terrans and formids, opening another front in the war. It has been debated amongst scholars how much this additional front contributed to the collapse of the faerie front lines, however the consensus is that between supply line issues, internal resistance and simple resource disparity, the rapid series of defeats was inevitable, followed by a hard fought offensive that ended with the invasion of the seat of government on the homeworld’s moon. During the following reconstruction period, the faeries joined the USS.

You have built your dwellings upon the bones of those you damned, your cities upon the mass graves of countless beings, and your countries in the burnt and scarred remains of what was once their homes.

Every last breath, every lineage cut short, every forest, fen and fallow torn asunder feeds it; with every wisp of smoke, every incremental creep of a warming world, and with every drop falling from retreating glaciers it grows. A beast of fire and ice, choking ash and swelling seas, the roaring core of the earth surging forwards and the heartless cold of the endless reaches above plummeting down in its infernal halo.

This is not the gentle, loving death that carries souls softly into that good night, nor is it the wrath and rage of a mere god of war. It is the great equaliser, the callous harvestman scything wheat, wildflower and weed alike so that a new world may grow in its place. And when the slate is cleared, when the Earth’s lungs cough out the last of the soot and the ballard of life rises into a new chorus, you will be forgotten, the king of kings whose shattered ruins are razed by roots and rot, the mocking hand crushed beneath a universe it thought it could command, and its ruins buried not beneath that barren sands of a world that couldn’t live without it but the joyous songs of a planet unshackled from your iron grasp.

Some say magic died when a hail of shellfire tore an ancient god asunder. Others say it died when the whistle of engines dragged an old world kicking and screaming into a new one. Yet more say it died when the wheels of progress ground the very building blocks of the universe apart into ordered lists and categories. It has been said it died when some long lost soul first harnessed the all consuming light of fire to keep away greater evils that haunted the shadows.

But magic is not dead.

If you venture long enough into the wild lands you can find it, scorched and scarred, battered but not broken. Ancient beings who’s rattling voices sing ballads of fall and fallow; Good People who ask for your name and offer you a deal; silent colossi passing beneath trees that reach to the heavens; beasts that stalked the flickering borders of ancient campfires, and kind travellers who no longer know how long they have wandered these lands.

If you follow the coast you can find it, hear it in faint songs barely distinguishable above the breaking of the waves; see it in the dark shapes that glide over the reefs and shoals; be told of it in epic tales as sailors boast of their victories, and if you stay you might overhear whispers of awe and dread of the rage and might of what dwells within pelagic storms, those spirits who never returned from the sea, and the unfathomable might of leviathans known only to the cachalot and those rare few glimpsing a shadow in the depths.

If you travel through the country you can find it, temples of corrugated metal and bricks; archaic machines held together with welds, duct tape and dimly glowing runes; laughing farmhands heaving clods of soil from the earth to lob at eachother; faerie rocks jeering from the centre of a plowed field; forgotten gods standing motionless amongst the wheat; long abandoned churches that never fall into disrepair; half forgotten sigils carved into fence posts to ward off the Things in the night, and the eyes that yet still burn like red moons between the stalks of corn.

In the cities you can find it, in the prophecies etched and sprayed upon the subway walls by robed sages and masked youths; in the pig iron shrines to gods of the forge tucked in every nook and cranny of a foundry; in the clubs and bars that you can only find when you are shown them or when a full moon looms above; in the figures kneeled in the light of the street lamps and the shapes that lurk beyond their reach; in the graffiti that can race and dance or slowly shift upon the faces of buildings older than countries and refuse to be removed; in the timeworn temples that had the city built around them; in the druids of lawns and weeds; in the mages that carve their baseball bats with symbols of power and fill their trench coat pockets with glador brewed in basements and lifted from stores; in the bards that busk at the city crossroads and send ballads streaking across the globe in a crackle of sparks and binary; and in the warlocks both of new gods with bones of steel, veins of fire and skin a tough as concrete, and of the old gods that seep out like moss from the pavement as they refuse to be forgotten.

So as you go about your busy days, give a swift greeting to the magpies that watch and wait from the roofs and branches; pass a murmur of respect to the faerie oak that stands like an island in a sea of concrete; ignore the shapes glimpsed from the windows at night but draw the blinds and lock the doors. And always remember. That magic is not dead.

Probably a good idea to make something vaguely resembling a pinned post, so here we go.

Hey, I’m Molly, I like yapping about palaeontology and spec evo, and I’ve got a bunch of projects I’m working on across a few different universes (aka my brain can never focus on getting one thing done so it bounces around like a cricket on caffeine)

A not so empty universe: After a world war, a plague, and general societal collapse, humanity has made it to the stars, and realised that they’re not as alone as they had thought

-Funny space thing (name still a WIP): a slice of life thing about a bunch of university students on mars trying to survive their studies and each other

-Chimera: set at around the same time as FST, a new life-bearing world has been discovered. What’s unusual about it is that the life forms appear to originate from other worlds, including earth and the home worlds some of other sophonts

-Pasodau: set in the far future of this universe, a moon of a gas giant has been terraformed to house a species of lizards and 3 species of birds alongside various amphibians, fish, invertebrates and plants

A world without us: set after the extinction of humanity and the onset of a new glacial period, a community of sophont ravens have settled in the rusted hulk of a battleship on the plains of Doggerland. One of them named Graucraa has a great interest in the history of not on his own species, but the disappeared beings that came before them

Feorrlund: in a distant solar system, and old god known as The Architect brings life from Earth to populate a planet it has terraformed to live alongside life from its own home world. This planet is now home to the forgotten life of earth, magic, and far too many sophonts

Appalachi fae: fresh out of university, Dan Baker-Hewig makes the regrettable choice to sign up as a park ranger in a world where magic is very real and the forests are home to monsters, fae, and old gods, whilst also having to survive the other rangers.

Also the setting for a few short story things I’ve written and might post at some point.

So ye, feel free to ask about any of the projects, and hope y’all enjoy.

Here’s Alyssia’s twin Elliot, the token cishet of the group.

Finished the character sheet for Alyssia, one of the characters in the setting with the formids