The last time I drew something humanoid was more than a year ago so it was really nice to return to old ideas. There's some kind of story behind these characters but it's really vague because the initial purpose of this was to have fun drawing anthro bugs and anything else came in much later. I may or may not explore this further

I was able to get a scan of the page but I'm more used to taking photos (even though the result might look worse) so I'll leave them too just in case

Sorry for being inactive I barely have spare time. It's been nearly two months, woah!! It still feels like march started yesterday

There's a variety of different religious beliefs in beacons' world. One of the world's largest and most widespread religion has 8 major deities who are shown with quite similar appearances. The easiest way to identify a god in their standard form is to to look at their body color. A deity may be accompanied by symbolic plants/animals and objects, especially if the image is colorless. Text also might be present. Some gods have alternative forms which can be more popular in iconography than their standard ones.

It's disrespectful to show gods from the back side of the body, except for one.

1. Goddess of knowledge, medicine (especially the part dealing with childbirth) and law. All 8 sides of her body are "front" sides with two hands and two antennae. Always depicted with light-blue skin.

2. God of creativity and passion, whose all sides are backs. Has bright red skin. In the past this god used to have darker spots all over his body, but gave them away to a mortal who ended up having too many offspring, passing the spots to all of his male descendants. Antennae are not shown (you don't draw dicks on sacred images).

3. Goddess of plants and harvest. Besides her plant-growing abilities she's also known for creating and spreading diseases. Has light-coloured skin with a yellow or ochre tint.

4. Goddess of beasts. Created all living organisms and is able to control them. Beacons are resistant to the full mind control but susceptible to her power of inflicting dread and anxiety. Associated with willpower. Her standard form is a brown-coloured beacon but more often she's shown as a spiky snake-like creature. In this form she can change size and grow so large she'd shadow the sun or become smaller than any bug to crawl under the clothes of those who she deemes unworthy of her presence and sting them. Stings are excruciatingly painful.

5. Goddess of rain, rivers and the sea. Shares ruling over the last domain with her brothers. Though her powers are inextricably tied with sustaining life, she has no direct control over living beings. Typically shown with dark blue skin.

6. God of wind. Controls wind (..who would have thought) and serves as a protector of travellers. Talkative and upbeat, he cheers them up, gives advice and tells entertaining stories, helping them continue their journeys. Has orange-coloured skin.

7. God of deep water. Hides below the surface and rarely shows himself, though in his early years used to live among mortals and taught them sailing along with his sister and brother. His long antennae can easily wrap around victim's legs and drag the unlucky one to the bottom to either kill or imprison and force to work on him. Can control underwater beasts but only to a small extent. Associated with quiet death.

8. God of change. The all-present spirit is inert and cannot change on its own. This god makes sure night would change into day, hunger would come after nourishment, and every living thing would eventually meet their death. He's quite a lonesome god and under normal circumstances rarely interacts with mortals or other entities. Has exceptional persuasion skills. Several myths support the idea of him creating the moon and stars which partly explains why he's described having white skin. The other part comes from that no mortal has ever seen his true form, so no other colour can represent his ever-changing appearance except pure white.

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Important to note that for beacons relationships between siblings play a much greater role than those between parents. So instead of being paired up with a husband/wife higher gods belong to their own sibling groups which go as follows:

Goddess of knowledge – god of passion

Goddess of plants – goddess of beasts

Goddess of rain – god of wind – god of deep water

God of change (only child oh)

In older times gods were treated as separate entities connected only by blood but in recent decades there's been a shift to a more monotheistic view of world. Since gods come from the same source (force/spirit/power) it was believed that they sort of popped up in the world that already existed before them and were left to fool around and figure out what to do by themselves. They weren't a part of the spirit anymore and the only connection remaining was the ninth eye in the middle of the head that could actually see (for mortals it's basically blind, so they were believed not to be bound with the source at all). Some followers suggest that deities and, in fact, the whole world were never separated from it. When the force splitted itself into "sides", giving gods physical bodies, it manifested into other living beings as well, allowing itself to have as many perspectives of the existing world as possible. When a living thing dies, their side turns away to a new life. Gods' powers are not separate, but a spectrum, manifestations of the same thing. The number of turns is considered to be unimaginably big, but finite. It's up for debate what will happen when the force will be out of turns.

Two kids at a market stall. The merchant gets nervous, thinking if they might be thieves. Fortunately, they are just regular customers.

I'm drawing a thing and it's not ready yet

I'll just leave these dragon sketches I made a couple days ago so it doesn't feel empty. They're old OC's of mine

random

Wow it's been more than a month. Didn't realize that. I guess I have something to show but uhh my sketchbook got under heavy rain so paper here it's a little wavy. It's a miracle it had so little damage considering what happened to my other stuff. Also nights proceed to get longer and I wasn't lucky to take better photos. Anyway..

All beacons' religions are based on mythology and existence of numerous gods and spirits inhabiting the world. The closest thing they have to monotheism is a religion formed around the existence of a transcendent all-present force (spirit) which, however, cannot perceive the world and interact with it by itself, only being able to do so by splitting itself into many different "sides". Only sides are able to maintain physical bodies and though they all come from the same source and it the end would become one again, they are treated as completely different entities. There're 8 major sides – 8 major gods, other deities are considered lesser. Aand I'll just leave it there because I'd better wait for the time I have a fine picture depicting gods to have at least something accompany a ton of sentences that would come describing them.

Many religions practices and ceremonies are performed at altars. The most simple home altar is a wooden table, low enough so that a beacon would have to kneel down to perform any ritual. The most common offering is food, other offerings include things associated with a specific god. Watered down alcohol may be poured only on certain celebrations. It's a very uncommon practice and in some households it's not allowed and has to be done secretly. After all, you want your gods to be sober to do their duty.

Living creatures sacrifices are also practiced, but sacrificing other beacons is forbidden (at least on the territory of the forementioned "all comes from one spirit" believers). Animals cannot be sacrificed on wooden altars and it's quite rare for a beacon to a have a stone one at home, so cooking and eating a designated animal or specific parts of it (obviously offering a piece to the gods in the process) on a celebration is usually enough.

An interesting religious thing are these sticks made from wood or bone, always coming in number of 8. If their owner didn't make them themselves, they may have some standard decorations and phrases pre-carved but most part of their sides would always remain empty for the owner to fill. Each stick is devoted to one of the major gods and contains an encarved list of things which a beacon wants to ask for from the deity. An altar is not needed when you have sticks but you should still make an offering if possible.

The sticks also serve as some sort of passport as encarvings may contain information about beacon's place of birth, place of work, profession, number of children and other things like the kind of crop their village grows even if the owner has nothing to do with farming but wants the crop to be protected anyway.

All stick sets are personal and follow their owner to the grave. However, taking copies is not frowned upon. Keeping the original set for yourself and leaving a copy with the deseased is also fine but the ritual of changing sets should be performed by close relatives who wish to keep the original sticks as a memory. Otherwise it might be considered disrespectful.

That's not something I'd typically post but it was nearly impossible to hold back. Found old rough sketches in one of my sketchbooks and decided to further develop the idea. And.. to make less rough sketches. This thing happens after homestuck ends and players enter their new universe so it's not related to the plot that much or anything.

So, before departing into the future players left some information about their former planet societies. Their biographies became foundations of many religions on earth C, some of which were more popular than other. Throughout hundreds of years pre-earth C history has been rewritten many times, and some of the players completely lost not only their appearances, but even names. So when gods return, they find themselves in a society quite different from what they've left, with some morals and values altered, as people from the new universe never had all that cultural basis extinct societies had and basically had to start everything from scratch. Players still try to communicate with people and make world a better place, using their powers. Some religious people are disdained to see that gods are actually guys in fancy pyjamas, others suppose they're impostors. Politicians make attempts to communicate with players and persuade them to leave, being afraid of what they can do.

One of the less popular cults was a cult formed around the idea of "a true troll ruler with blood of a forgotten caste". When trolls and humans rediscovered ectobiology (in their world ectobiology was restricted and then banned for a long time to push forward natural reproduction and avoid unethical experiments, and I highly doubt they ever used fuchsia blood genetic material), cult followers weren't excited by the idea of waiting another millennium for a heiress to be born and just made her themselves.

Obviously, the heiress isn't really going to rule anything and is only a tool, but many followers don't know/don't realize this and sincerely believe she's destined to become a leader. Also, if it was possible to make a fuchsia blood grub once, why wouldn't it be possible to start over if the first one doesn't comply? There're no reliable sources for the heiress to know her physical abilities and she never learned to swim. Feeling alone both inside and outside her community, anxiously waiting for what the cult has for her, leave the heiress no other option and she runs away to find gods herself, as they are the last ones in the entire world, who've seen a living member of her caste.

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She grinded down her horns herself after stealing a horn file so it would be harder to identify her

I also doubt trolls would still wear signs at this point (except players' ones) but here's a sign for her anyway

Here're some sprites too. In her "royal" outfit she's just.. feferi.. but she also wears a swimsuit thingie or whatever condense wore, so the skirt is more of an accessory here. On the last one her cape is long instead of skirt. I doubt though she'd be wearing any of this. After everything that has happened to her she's reluctant to take any leading position for now..

Inspired by inktober day 2 –spiders

Dragonflies

Actual proportions here

The smaller one belongs to a specie which is totally capable of hunting on its own, but is often outcompeted by larger and stronger species. They don't have the ability to injest digestive fluids inside bodies of their prey, but certainly love stealing others' liquefied food. These dragonflies have learnt to cooperate with large dragonfly species (like the one in the pic) which prey exclusively on other dragonflies. On the ends of their haltere-like organs there are red sports which dim when averted from sunlight. When the small dragonflies spot another dragonfly, too busy waiting when their prey gets partially dissolved and not paying attention to what's happening around, they land nearby and turn balancers with the red-coloured side up. The red dots help dragonfly-eaters spot their prey. They leave their prey's food to the small ones and normally don't hunt on species that guide them to their meals.

Unfortunately I cannot post much right now (I've got a few texts but it'd be better to have something illustrating them) so here are a few sketches from my studies

Thought it wouldn't be bad for horizontal animals to have more limbs, because more limbs = more things you can do with them, so beacons should get an upgrade too. Now they have 9 limbs – 5 hands and 4 legs, but that doesn't really change anything or contradict the leading hand thing, because they regard the double hand part as one hand or a "hand unit". Since these two hands are most of the time used simultaneously it doesn't really matter which one is the leading hand, but if none of them is, that's going to get noticed

Two eyes for each hand unit, 8 total. There's a 9th eye on the top of their head that acts as a third eye present in some animals of our planet

This also gives me an idea that beacons would often be too lazy to portrait all 9 eyes in their art, especially if they're portraying a horizontal animal, because we literally do the same thing. Not many people would draw a stylized fly with five eyes and a spider with the whole eight eyes set. As long as you can guess an animal from its silhouette shape and a few key features, no additional details are needed

I'm not very good at describing breathing and how sounds are made, but well here's an attempt of doing so. Hexapodal beacons have 3 lungs, each with some sort of a voice box. All voice boxes are equally developed, and only two of them are being used when speaking, while the third one is "resting", giving beacons the ability to chatter nonstop. It's the opposite in horizontal animals, whose upper lung does not have an exhaling nostril, and air just comes out of the inhaling one. Upper voice box is the most developed, and side voice boxes cannot produce any complex sounds, except probably low noises, but some animals cannot do even that. Now they have 4 lungs, but that's bot much of a change (for vertical animals, at least). Singing in four voices is certainly an art of its own, but any regular beacon is fine speaking with only two

small sketches

bird

Flower time!!

I wanted to do a little shitposting today with my recent bug photos, but something more important needs to be said before people assume too much. I'm an awful procrastinator, but I'd better not hold

Just to make some things clear (cause I found some of you guys talking about that): I checked out Simon Roy and his Amphorans project and no, I didn't reference his sophonts specifically. But I did use one image as a reference and it was the one with a horizontal animal (also designed for his project) which I found on Pinterest when I wanted to make more a suitable body plan for horizontal terrestrial life. In fact, I liked that someone had similar ideas! When I was drawing beacons for the first time, I used insects and crustaceans as refs combined with my intention to make them look less rough and more fuzzy because I adore fuzzy aliens. I won't say I've never seen any of Roy's other amphorian art though. They look faintly familiar to me, so I might have stumbled upon them several years ago when I used to consume tons of content daily and forget everything on the next day. I don't remember. But as I've just said, I've never used them as references intentionally and the amphorian blog was not known to me til recently.

It's my first time posting art on Tumblr and I don't want to be associated with plagiarism so can I totally try reworking my species and make it less similar. I have a lot of info about their biology (like why their third antennae isn't used in manipulation and cannot be seen outside at all, how they give birth and grow), culture, food habits, families, language (especially how they breathe while speaking) and some kind of script, and even how perception of femininity and masculinity varies between cultures. All of that I haven't posted yet because I have nothing to illustrate all this stuff with. If I really need to rework the stuff, I can do this, it's fine, just tell me. But it's gonna take time

Also the exact pin with the image that I used:

After stumbling upon my sketches of bird creatures from one of my older posts which have a classic "2 forelegs – 2 middle legs – 2 hindlegs" body plan I decided to think of something that would fit better in the beacons' world. All big animals with a horizontal body position now use their side forelegs and a hindleg for locomotion while other three limbs are specialized for whatever purpose (the middle foreleg is typically specialized for holding, grabbing or stabbing soon-to-be food, and middle legs have a much wider range of specialization from being just an extra pair of claws to actual wings)

These are sketches of dog-like creatures which weren't intended to be coloured but I really liked them so now they are. These beasts remind me of butterflies because of their head silhouette, calling them butterfly-face dogs or butterfly dogs sounds suitable enough.

They aren't a serious threat to beacons but might attack when provoked. However, among domesticated butterfly dogs there're breeds which are much larger and stronger than their wild counterparts. Unlike other dogs, they're specifically trained to aim at beacons' underparts when attacking, which may cause heavy blood loss and even death (especially if the dog isn't trained to stop after one attack). Because of their notorious reputation, "killer breeds" are often banned in settlements with only farmers having the exclusive right to breed them as usually even a mere possibility of a killer dog nearby is enough for a potential thief to think twice before breaking in one's territory.

THE LEADING HAND

Just like humans, beacons (I'm not good at naming so I'll keep the name my friend suggested. I hope nobody has taken it..) can be divided into "right-handed" and "left-handed".

Though with their radial symmetry beacons look mostly the same from all sides and prefer to describe objects' position in space using other objects (usually big and unmovable) as reference points, they can distinguish perfectly well between left and right, but do not have concepts of back and front. At least, not in the same way as we do.

A beacon is considered "right-handed" if their leading hand is the one between two antennae which serve not only as manipulating organs, but also as organs of smell and taste. This side can be marked as "front", though in beacons' mind there's no front and back, but there's "leading hand side" and "opposite of leading hand side".

When talking to another beacon, a beacon should turn, their leading hand side facing the interlocutor. This way two other hands can be easily seen from above and that they do not hold a knife or anything else sharp enough to stab you as soon as you lower your guard. Greeting someone with the leading hand is considered very polite.

There're "left-handed" beacons, but their life is much harder than a left-handed human's. Language is not adapted well for them, and those kinds of work which should be done with both the hand and manipulating antennae can be very exhausting of completely impossible if they decide to use their actual leading hand.

Obviously, such a socially important distinction in difference between hands' motor skills has its place in beacons' language and culture. Just like in humans' languages, "right" is a synonym to truth, justice and government and is also related to concepts of loyalty, honesty and reliability. "Left-handedness" is related not only to concepts of dishonesty, secretiveness, deception, betrayal and anything illegal, but also to cunningness and wit, mysteriousness and having magical abilities. In ancient times, characters and gods portrayed with always showing viewers the "back" side could be chaotic and extremely clever tricksters, being able to outsmart any enemy, as well as just regular antagonists. Sometimes their concealed leading hand would hold an item, often magical, which they would reveal at the right moment of the story, finally turning around.