I came up with the idea for today's piece after watching My Octopus Teacher. It's a fantastic film, and I don't want to spoil it for anyone, so if you are interested, watch it before I ramble further. The part that inspired the art is when the octopus gathers dozens of pieces of stone and ocean debris around her, and she brings it all close to her body to form an incredibly effective camouflage and protective shell. Upon seeing this, I could immediately imagine something like this, living in space, gathering up a bunch of asteroid fragments to lie dormant in an asteroid field until a miner is foolish enough to fly too close. Hey, those low-temperature diamonds and void opals aren't going to harvest themselves!
Perils of Space Mining
Space can be a scary place, especially when you are tasked with mining asteroids that conceal giant octopus monsters. Subscribe here to aid in our efforts, and maybe we can spring for one of those fancy sensor suites that can detect nightmarish biological masses hidden beneath the surface.
Although the prospect of a giant octopus hiding in space rocks is terrifying, the way this film made me feel for a mollusk gives me hope for our inevitable future contact with alien civilizations. We are looking at an alien in MOT, and I have no problem empathizing with her. If the unfortunate soul getting pulled out of that spaceship was me, my empathy would shift to a deep-seated desire to feed the thing seismic charges and Gauss cannon rounds. Like American Eats, this is just a first draft, and I will draw a full-color version in the future.
I also posted the original concept sketch for Foliage Fascists. I usually do the first draft of anything by hand, and if I like the results, it goes to the scanner. If I don't like the results, I put it on a lightbox to make it again. These sketches will find their way here, along with the time lapses. Another Let's Draw on the channel today, I'm working on the graphite sketch for another comic to scan and work on digitally.
