Nathan Aubin

Currently a work in progress. I’m trying to follow the Grand Space Opera: Light Age challenge ArtStation ran a while back to see how well I can do under a tighter deadline, since my past self-assigned projects have been fairly loose in terms of how long I give myself and how many concepts I end up producing.

DESCRIPTION: This challenge called for designs for 8 alien characters, 2 alien creatures, and a character lineup to be produced within 4 weeks. The characters were meant to fit in a setting where humanity unlocked the secrets of warp drive technology and discovered we aren’t alone.

CHARACTER CONCEPT 1: Warp drive technology accidentally pierced the walls between our dimension and a shadowy dimension adjacent to ours. The native species can project themselves into our reality through this hole, but without a tether to anchor them here their tenuous presence is at risk of slipping away.

When I saw they included aliens from other dimensions as an option in the prompt, I knew right away I wanted to have at least character explore that idea. I wanted a smoky, shadowy, mysterious species that would either act as inscrutable villains or strange outsiders, with some sort of portal or containment device as part of their design.

While I liked the posing of the first refined concept (number 6 on the first sheet), I felt the second did a better job of implying a culture and personality, so that’s the one I ended up choosing as the final design.

CHARACTER CONCEPT 2: The result of a previously mindless species of slime organisms being spliced with another species by extraterrestrial visitors, these beings are still adapting to their newfound intelligence. Their culture, in as much as one has been able to develop, revolves around self-improvement – although without much knowledge of how to do so, they often find themselves working for whoever promises to help them towards this end.

For this, I had a less clear goal in mind. I knew I wanted to make a soft-bodied sort of slime character, but nothing beyond that. I think the lack of a clear direction to start really shot me in the foot for this one, since the initial concepts ended up taking way longer than I would’ve liked, and didn’t produce many ideas I was super happy with. I did realize I was putting too much detail into each concept at this point as well, so I started loosening up part way through.