What Could’ve Been. Classic Speculative Space Art By Robert McCall

The Asari, if they weren't humanoid

an idea i had

Tried my hand at redesigning the Asari from Mass Effect if they were a little bit less humanoid. One of the things about the Asari is that they're considered relatively attractive by pretty much most other aliens in the setting, so i didn't want to deviate to much from something that was fairly humanoid-ish. So I kinda went with something that was a combination between a bird and a rat, and i interpreted their crest as a fringe of feathers sort of like what cockatoos have. Turians I think are going to be be raptor like so having some bird features in as for salarians, I think the overall slender build and large eyes would be what they'd find appealing.

Alright, I've sorta only talked about humans a little bit in my world-building project union-station (working name considering changing it) but earthlings are kinda rare in space, mostly because they don't travel or migrate much. Most humans you'll see wondering the known galaxy are their genetically modified descendants. (I've taken to calling them colonists). Chimeras, are one such group. They're from a tropical world called Amazon (named after the then long gone amazon rainforest). Life on amazon had a higher degree of biological compatibility than on other alien planets, and a unique domain of life which was capable of modifying their own genome by integrating the genes of other organism. So when the first human colonists came to amazon, they opted to splice their genetics with some of the fauna there.

Genetically chimeras are a bit more biologically unstable than other old era colonists in that they're prone to some rather interesting mutations with the most common being the duplication of organs and other body parts. This amazonian is sporting an extra set of arms, which is a fairly common mutation among the population.

WIP, 4-armed golem lady

just another batch of sketches, i haven't worked traditionally in a while, so have a messy doodle

Just my current (wip). I'm working on another short comic, its only going to be a few pages, but hopefully you'll find it interesting. I'll post the whole comic once I'm finished drawing it

Learning to draw mechanical things, decided to make some cyborgs. They have literal face masks, its more of a stylistic choice on their part

Sketch WIP

Imsee Recorder with adopted child

I've been thinking a little bit how the Imsee relate to their intelligent constructs. I'm a bit hesitant to call them robots since I think its a very human-centric term that probably doesn't translate well to other sophonts. The idea of the mechanical servant, just wasn't really prevalent among their kind and they had more of a tendency to view technology as either tools or direct extensions of themselves. Mix that in with their propensity to cybernetics and you essentially have a species who finds the concept of an intelligent machine kind of absurd.

So why do they have sapient robots anyway? , you may ask. Well Imsee have incredibly long and well detailed memories and due to the nature of their language can communicate amongst their kind much quicker and in far greater detail than humans. And so, for a long time, most information was retained though oral traditions and the death of a storyteller or a record keeper was a pretty big deal. For the Imsee, intelligent machines were not workers but instead a unique way retain life past death. Its kind of a soma situation, recorders retain the memories of Imsee who've pasted on, and are seen as an aspect of the individual which created them.

Inktober 1 

Forgotten Giant

colored and sketched in krita inked with staedtler fineliners 

(WIP)

fire demon, a redraw of an older piece. Wanted to try making it more dynamic

A Gargoyle

Just a little bit of shading practice