I had the pleasure of illustrating Caro Asercion's new speculative biology game, Exquisite Biome. As a creature design nerd, and someone who previously made a very short-lived, high effort speculative biology nature documentary podcast, I was super jazzed to get to channel some of that creative energy into this. As a fan of Caro's design (and layout) work, broadly, I think you'll find a lot to love in this.
I'll be posting the creature illustrations I did for this book over the coming week, and maybe talking a bit about my thought process for designing the creatures featured in here.
With all of Exquisite Biome we wanted to not just show animals, but the points of interest. What would the nature doc on this animal show? Mating rituals, survival strategies etc.
We wanted it to feel like field notes & scientific illustrations.
For this set that appears on the cover I wanted to look at mimicry in prey animals, as a defensive strategy. I imagined a small gilder evolved to mimic an aggressive predatory display when seen from the underside. Such that when moving quickly, it might deter ambush predators.
I wanted something where the weight of this creature (esp from it jumping to the top of the grass to reach seedpods for food) would be counterbalanced. Here I imagine a complex series of balancing strategies these creatures might employ to forage.
In temperate wetlands, chunky ungulates take an unconcerned nap.
If you aren't aware yet that I am a huge fan of Brynn Metheney's creatures, the way she is able to give personality and weight to her designs is something I was thinking about all through this project. One thing that nature documentaries often don't really cover because it doesn't create a great narrative or exciting footage, is animals at rest. I wanted to make sure we got some of that as well.
Caro, from the beginning, wanted to avoid creatures that might trigger insectophobia. I love bugs and I think their particular evolution is fascinating, so I didn't want to completely avoid some of the core concepts entirely; they have life cycles that are vital, interesting and creatively stimulating for the goals of the game itself. With this in mind I applied certain bug-like traits to more terrestrial vertebrates in order to be able to think about those interesting evolutionary traits without being potentially triggering to sensitive viewers.
Here I wanted to take a look at the morphology of creatures that go egg>larva>pupa>adult without actually treading into the realm of the gross, so this was the result. The creature was heavily influence by my old days participating in and admiring the Creature of the Week competition on the now-defunct ConceptArt.org forums back in the late '00s- early '10s. Particularly the Catapult Creature by Andrew Hou and allowing me to do a new play on a transformative life cycle that I drew over a decade ago.