Acro's Art Blog

I took a bunch of "reference" photos while on one of the islands so I could do something along these lines. Me n' @glasseyeartspy's OCs (the pig is named Rhodium now).

I wish it had actually been this nice but with the several tropical storms swirling around us, the humidity was miserable. If we were in an area with wind, or even on a boat blasting through wind and waves, that was totally fine! But being in the still air was awful.

A more accurate portrayal of what it was like most days.

I am sick with god-knows-what that reared its ugly head halfway back home so I need to go get in bed and suffer for a while from that before I can do more.

hrhrghfh... trying to distract my brain from the stress that is the water heater deciding to leak where it CAN'T be fixed and may need full replacement, 3 days before we're supposed to be leaving on a week-long trip across the country

gradient maps my beloved

Erelim's seasonally appropriate, so he was the subject of this attempt

It's been a while...

A familiar face from the SU days I've been meaning to revamp into her own thing since 2017, and am just now getting the motivation to do so.

She's now a creature along the lines of a selkie or swan maiden that has a sea-going monster form, and a more humanoid land-going form with her "monster skin" as a wrap around her waist.

Children!

It used to be that I wanted the Tauric to lay shark-like egg casings, but this time around I've decided to go this route.

Like the image says, the eggs are laid in small batches and are very insect-like. They're pretty soft but harden into a tough, leathery consistency within an hour or so. After that, they're tended to in communal nurseries, and as they incubate they become more like insect pupae, the shape belying the embryo inside. They also get weird and twitchy the closer they are to hatching.

"Hatching" is very similar to ecdysis, the egg casing splitting along the back and the neonate emerging backwards out of it. Their coloration is dark and grey, and as they age they get slightly more vibrant and their markings thin out.

The young are fed by their adult caretakers (either their actual biological parents or the other adults in their units), and taught communication beyond their instinctual body language, "hand-eye coordination" with their palp-arms, and other important early life functions.

Fawnbug baby preview…

I guess that’s my next area to mess around in with my Tauric aliens. :v

The revamping is done! Ten years after their inception I feel like they make more sense to what I had been wanting to go for. They're called Taurics as they resemble centaurs in a way. If centaurs were large, arthropod-ish, and their upper torso was actually their head and they had an extra secondary head on top of it like a weird hat. I'm still working out the kinks of their internal anatomy and touching up on revamping their culture and such from what I'd done back in the day (most of it lost thanks to the original document file being corrupted, boo). But for now, have this polished sketch set.

more alien revamp progress trying to make the anatomy more believable and less.. whatever the hell I was doing before

also toying around with what body parts might have been before they became what they are currently (the "ancestor" in the upper right is very heavily mantid-based) and then working off of that. still a ways to go, but it's more fleshed out now.

sometimes it's moments like this that make me look back and go 'hm, maybe I have improved artistically over time' and feel less stagnant

almost…. there…. 💀

gonna leave this to sit overnight at least so I can come back at it and do one more round of nitpicking before I consider it "done". at this point it's mostly finishing effects anyways.

leave it to me to plan out a piece and then get lost as hell in the rendering of a singular dimension of the piece that was supposed to be blurred to begin with

eh I'll probably just blur the tall grass in the foreground.

I can just imagine how nuts I'll go when I actually get to the rendering of the subject and then the background aspects.

thought I got away with not getting sick after holiday traveling (stupid acid reflux flare-ups aside)

nope :)

woke up at like 2 AM with the worst burning throat I've had in years, and it's still present despite taking cold meds. raw burning sensation in throat and upper chest, no actual cough but all the discomfort, light-headed, everything feels hot…. tried to scribble something to represent it w/ Wick

I feel like I should be able to breathe fire or something and bc we just went over this new attendance policy at work and I am on call tomorrow I have to at least try to show up and can't just call off like I normally might :) :) :)

I feel watched... what could possibly be watching at this depth?

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Hey look I finished that sketch! It's... well, it's acceptable, I don't feel like I can mess with it much more. I tried throwing some sea foliage in there to make it feel less "empty", but it directly contradicted the "empty ocean depths" feel that was in the original doodle.

Ponzu's reflective eyes flashing in the deep.

recycling a little dude from... the mid 2000s? into a new thing

not gonna lie, if I didn't set out to make a flying design I 100% would've kept the stupid arms. I love them.

it's raining and thundering enough for the power to be flickering sometimes and I love it

@mixterglacia, however, not so much

I doodled this last time we had storms rolling through and I've been sitting on it since

tumblr is going to eat this file so here’s an alternative viewing spot 2021 got off to an amazing start of every day at work feeling like a hectic Monday and has been kicking my ass, and not much has happened art-wise. But I can at least compile some doodles/forever-stuck-in-limbo WIPs/rendering experiments that are somewhat recent. :v

felt like doing a new header for my twitter, one with the proper dimensions to not roach the image out