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StrandedAlien — Tkallu WIP
Published: 2012-09-14 02:32:38 +0000 UTC; Views: 392; Favourites: 2; Downloads: 3
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Description
EDIT: Like other members of his species, he has four arms, but I had erased the lower pair just before scanning so I could figure out the pose of the upper pair. I'm so used to envisioning him in my head I hadn't noticed.I haven't drawn in a while, but I've lately been inspired to redesign one of my alien uwan characters, Tkallu. He's an older brother of Ksyylid, who's elsewhere in my gallery. Tkallu and Yshai, their older sister, are basically nonconformists. Yshai likes to take exotic mind-altering substances and pal around with freedom fighters and other rabble unfit for the alien aristocracy they were born from, and Tkallu likes to come along, maybe sleep with some of them, or otherwise catch a buzz or engage in his pastime of learning languages and programming translation systems. You could say he's a "cunning linguist."
WIP because I plan to ink and or color it, but the design is mostly fixed, except for some clothing and jewelry details.
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Comments: 12
Very unique clothing designs--it all gives a rich, foreign feel.
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I like the expression and the clothing design (that's always hard for me). For some reason, though, I get a strong "girl" vibe from this character. I'm not sure how (or whether) it should be fixed. Obvious things like decreasing the size of the eyes and head, lengthening the torso, and widening the shoulders might not be anatomically accurate. A more subtle could be widening the stance. Or maybe this species simply all look like skinny girls to humans. That could cause awkwardness.
And what's the thing on his right arm?
>>"cunning linguist."<<
oh god
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[link] Here's a drawing I forgot to scan of his younger brother, au naturel. May help a bit since he's not obscured by loose flowing robes,tiered skirts,etc.
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> Or maybe this species simply all look like skinny girls to humans.
DING DING DING DING! 
The males also have a range from more or less "human-feminine" and neotenous. Some members of the aristocracy (which Tkallu and his brother are members of) have had their appearances exaggerated towards more gracile/neotenous. I imagine it'd be quite awkward. I imagine a drunk human male bringing a lovely uwan male home one night. It all goes well until "BOING". Assuming the human is straight. Otherwise it'd be a pleasant surprise. (Which is why they're designed that way. I want them to /look/ outwardly familiar...then suddenly come out of left field with something weird.
As for his right arm, the shoulder has a big poofy sleeve-thing, and the part immediately below that is tiered like a tiered skirt (like what he's wearing below the waist)
He started off in my mind as a perverted clumsy buffoon (especially among humans)but over the years, he's developed and gained the power of linguistic skill, programming skill, and a decent amount of intelligence.He's still pervy and would bed anything with a pulse. He'd be a perfect candidate for the diplomatic corps of the Kinks. xD (Diplomatic corps who deal with aliens--far more alien than Tkallu-- with varying reproductive methods. Link to the intro of the gallery for those who don't understand: [link] Also, just look at bensen-daniel's art. It's awwwesome.
Which is hard, expressions or clothing design? Or both? When it comes to expressions, when I draw kinda conceptual pieces like this, I think of my character's archetypal personality. You (rhetorically speaking, you may not actually do this) may have a mental image of person with a certain predominant aspect of their personality. "This guy is neurotic", "this woman is tough",etc. I start with that and then find an expression or pose that fits.
As for the clothing, I look at lots of stuff, and think of the aesthetic and/or environment. I want these guys to look poofy and fancy, kind of Elizabethan. The tiered skirts though, came from an earlier piece I did, and that was inspired by my girlfriend, who wears tiered skirts that I love on her.
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Horray for me!
Do uwan females have wide hips? They would help them look female.
Care to go into the sexual selection that made them evolve large, robust females? Do they lay eggs?
>>He'd be a perfect candidate for the diplomatic corps of the Kinks. xD <<
Thanks a lot for the shout-out!
Expression is hard, but for me clothing design is harder. I think I've been improving with expression by copying photographs and artists I like. Do you ever start with an expression and draw out the character from there?
The clothes work well. As you can see, I stole them
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They do have wider hips, though it varies for reasons I'll explain.
The scenario I've had up to this point, which may or may not be refined, is that their line descended from a quasi-eusocial species that lost its eusociality,but has kept remnants of its sex distinctions. The line between reproductive worker and female blurs, with actual females being somewhere on a continuum between the two, with the more "worker-like" females substituting for robust human males in various roles. This also wreaks havoc with societies like Tkallu's that try to impose rigid roles on fluid biological beings. Male competition is more slanted towards body displays and sperm competition (That design on his skirt isn't solely decorative...)
The females also lay eggs (but have the hips to have more room to hold them before laying) and so aren't encumbered for nine months. At the moment, they use a sort of fungiculture to grow a sort of placenta fungus. The egg shells are leathery and stretch.
I think in the "sex with aliens" comment thread you mentioned a species that starts off sedentary and agricultural, and only later learns nomadism with the invention of ceramic pots, and the uwan would probably be the same. The newly-hatched young are also smaller and different-looking, and cling to the fur of the males. (female chests are bare, though would still be clingable.)
As for Tkallu being a candidate for the Kinks, I meant working as a diplomat, not as a...client? Though yes, he isn't weird enough.
The creative evolution of the uwan, like the biological evolution of organisms, involved a certain amount of working with what I have within certain constraints. The uwan started of as a single far-more-humanoid winged bug-girl in a short story I wrote several years ago. In that story, she was a humanoid reproductive caste of an otherwise ordinary thoroughly insectoid eusocial species. That caste got expanded into a species and became the uan-retk. The castes remained, but looked more similar to each other. Even the original version of Ksyylid was called an alate (they also used to have wings), and his mother was a queen in the eusocial sense (though also aristocracy socio-economically-politically speaking)Over time, their more obviously eusocial and insect-like characteristics got lost to the point where, while they look rather buggy, they're more like armored vertebrates with armor softened to the point of squishy rubberiness, and became the uwan.
When it comes to expressions and drawing the character from there, I don't think I've done that. The closest I've done that is with Ksyylid and Tkallu's mother, Thyssahnu, who was made after Ksyylid, and was first made around a kind of smug, imperious expression. I don't have much advice on the clothing except to look at lots of different kinds, I suppose.
Ooh! Thanks for the picture! I'll be commenting on it on the page for that picture.
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I like the evolutionary history you got there. If these guys are like hymenoptera, then they have diploid breeding females, diploid nonbreeding workers (which are different from females only because of hormones, and might become breeders given the right stimuli), and haploid males (the selective sense of this can be found here:[link] ). I would expect an uwan woman to give birth to a son or daughter in her first pregnancy, then a son or worker in subsequent pregnancies, with the chances of a worker dropping when the first-born daughter leaves the home (there may also be post-hatching hormones playing a role, so worker hatchlings might grow into breeding females if places in an environment without females). This would do interesting things to inheritance of property and titles. Also, with a society that's roughly 50% male, 30% worker, 20% female, it would explain why men are small---they spend most of their time competing for the attention of the limited number of females, while the robust workers do all the real work. With the advent of technology, hormone treatments that turn workers into females and vice-versa might destabilize traditional gender roles, but I imagine something like Ming China, with aloof emperesses, fluttering courtiers, and sinister eunuchs.
If the eggs are leathery (and therefore flexible), I would imagine that narrow-hipped females would be at an advantage, because they'll be able to run more efficiently.
I like the idea of a fungus womb. Are they transportable, or are they rooted in the ground? I like the idea of babies clinging to daddy-fur
You've made me realize that my baby-tree aliens will have to have crazy sexual dimorphism, with a much larger and more aggressive female, in order to guard the egg. Thanks for the insight.
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I actually have two broad societies (or groups thereof) for the uwan. One that is very stratified and rigid, which is the one Tkallu and Ksy are from; and a purely space-dwelling one which had been forced to become more flexible and egalitarian, both for cultural/technological reasons (like hormone treatments), and because they started off in cramped ships where there was no room for the empresses, courtiers, and eunuchs. Only crewmembers. The males in this space-dwelling society also tend to be less exaggerated in appearance than the other one.
How do I make the varying appearance of the males work with haploid males, since they'd all be drawn from the mother's genes?
Hmmm...Then the eggs probably would be inflexible. The workers tend to be the narrower ones.
The fungus-wombs: I think they start off as rooted in the ground, but somebody figures out how to put them in pots or carts. Even sedentary people could use the miniaturized set-up to make it more modular and easier to replace or move cultures.
You're welcome for the insight! Thank you for yours!
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Sounds good. Although you know, you might consider reversing those places. Michael Flynn has thought about the problem of governing a space habitat, and figured out it's actually a perfect place for a dictatorship to arise. All the means of survival are centralized. They have to be. Civil disobedience, even striking, cannot be tolerated because the habitat MUST continue to function at all times. And forget about armed insurrection. Any weapons-fire (even lasers and tasers) would risk damaging something vital. In times of crisis, there must be a firmly-established hierarchy, so those qualified to make decisions are not questioned (voting on whether to change the interest rate might cause problems in the long run, but voting on whether to reboot the life-support system or not will kill everyone right now). It sounds like the perfect place for a monarch, down to the death-by-dagger-assassination.
Damn. Ninjas in space. I gotta write that down.
Anyway...
Conciously manipulating the hormones that uwan control gender is a logical step in social engineering, maybe with a popular reaction and social consequences like the introduction of mass birth-control was for humans.
For haploid males---I assume whatever individual traits they have, they got from their mothers. They'll be masculinezed clones of their mothers, while females and workers will have both fathers and mothers, like humans.
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