Creating an alien ecosystem (Patreon)

Once again, generous donor J.M. asked me to create a commission from Robert Reed's "Great Ship" universe - this time the low-energy ecosystem inhabited by the "Luckies" - a genus of tiny hive intelligences.

...“A single Lucky is only this big. The size of a dust mite, in essence. Autochemotrophic metabolisms. Low energy, minimal complexity. Not only aren’t they particularly bright creatures, when taken alone, but they’re pretty much helpless too. A few million Luckies are about as sharp as one average human brain,” he said. “But they don’t feel at home until they number in the hundreds of trillions. That’s what lives on the other side of this mountain. A nation of tiny entities intimately tied together. Together, they build giant eyes that float on their lake home, catching every wandering photon. And when enough of the Luckies think hard on one subject, they can dream up the greatest thoughts imaginable.”

There was also a complicated ecosystem around these beings, consisting of light-hungry trees with bright, mirror-like leaves, animals which tapped underground root systems, and robust, hard-shelled organisms which could weather long periods of hunger and cold. Not many were described in detail, presenting me with a lucky "blank slate" to draw on as I pleased. I started with a lot of simple sketches.

We picked a few of the best organisms, and laid them out on a composite ecosystem diagram.

The "Luckies" I indicated with the buoy-like artifact floating on the lake. But I felt that something was missing, and thus decided to draw a magnified insert showing one of the "Luckies" themselves.

To save time I just drew half of the critter, and then replicated and re-posed the other half in post-production.

The other critters in the panorama were likewise drawn in a similar process, and composited in. Observe here that while I use digital processes extensively, every line which appears was initially drawn by ink pen on paper. I think this rooting in traditional art gives my work a really nice, crisp, and "vital" look at the end.

Final composition with the "Luckies" in the magnified insert.

This final composition took two entire days to colour digitally.

Finally, I labeled the diagram in a fashion similar to a vintage 1970s palaeontology illustration.

Thus, another neat commission came to an end.
Thank you all for your support on Patreon, and beyond!