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I’ve been working on ideas for fantasy agriculture a lot as of late and since I’m going closer to the wood elf model I thought about having trees, in particular oaks serve as the bases for elven farming. Having acorns serve as a main dietary staple for elves instead of grains and I thought I’d ask if their any potential pitfalls or something I’m overlooking?

Im still trying to decide whether or not these farmed oaks are their own species or magically modified from pre-existing trees? Either way oak trees and their acorns are the bases of my elves agriculture. Taking the role that grain would serve in other species as the primary source of carbs.

These oak trees alongside other domesticated nut/fruit/ and sap trees serve as the basis for elven food production. Growing together in large food forest with various poly-crops of legumes/ leafy vegetables/ gourds/ herbs/ berry bushes/ edible wild flowers and other edible plant life growing around their bases in coordinated garden glades meant to create a self sustaining ecosystem the elves only need to manage. Often incorporating magics to aid plant growth or repel pest (squirrels and weevils in particular are the bane of every elf farmers existence)

The acorns grown from elven oak trees are very different from wild acorns. Being over double (and in particularly massive and healthy trees quadruple) the size of their wild counterparts. Growing much larger batches per harvest and having fewer tannins that need leeching. The cultivation/ harvest/ and processing of these acorns still requires a lot of manual labour for elven farmers, even with the aid of botanical magics. In cases for more rural settlements or poor harvest wild acorns may be spliced in to bulk up the supply but do require more processing (particularly leeching the tannins) then the domestic stock do.

Some of the main pitfalls and set backs I’ve been able to see are mainly the set up time. Needing much longer to set these domestic oak trees up no matter which model I settle on (my elves live around ~200 on average so they have extra time but still).

here's a page about oak trees, which might help

Dive into oak trees' life stages, from seed to elder, and tips for enhancing their well-being. Ideal for tree lovers and property owners.

and one about the history of acorns as a staple food

Acorns are one of the most important foods of our past in North America, and they are also one of the most underutilized foods in the presen

It appears to take roughly 20 years for oak trees to start producing acorns, possibly less depending on the exact species. I'm not a botanist by any means, but here's an article on plant domestication

Domestication is a co-evolutionary process that occurs when wild plants are brought into cultivation by humans, leading to origin of new spe

with the addition of botanical magic, the process of domestication could be sped up a little. putting priority into the trees that start acorn production sooner, the ones that produce a lot of acorns, and the ones that produce bigger acorns, your elves could get their domestic oak trees. acorns are a super useful food crop, so you're definitely on the right track here! especially with the additional crops grown within the oak forest. forest agriculture is awesome.

#agriculture #outside sources

Did it possible to draw homo erectus,homo longi*denisovan), neanderthal, and homo florensis in a way that's din't looks like racist caricature? Snd I'm zealouself I hanged my site because i forgot my password and I have problem understanding guidelines and email don't coming Can you help? Please. I'm sorry if I ask for too much .

My favorite reconstructions are from Kennis and Kennis, I think they do a beautiful job of making our extinct kindred look lively and personable.

the caricature problem is a result of exaggerated features deliberately making them look less human as a way to make them seem inferior and unintelligent, which is not exclusive to caricatures of extinct hominids.

fair warning for nudity: (for some reason the link embed is not working?? also this site is not well built for mobile, so I recommend viewing it on a computer)

https://www.kenniskennis.com/

but seriously, I adore their version of Lucy the australopithecus, arguably one of our least human ancestral species.

(image description: a bust photo of a reconstructed australopithecus, which has very dark skin and fur-like black hair on the head, jaw, and shoulders. She looks more ape-like than human-like, but has still been depicted with a warm smile and has her eyes positioned as if she is looking directly at the viewer. end description)

here are some other good reconstruction artists:

and an interview with another artist who mentions some people in the field that he personally looks up to, including all the artists I have already mentioned:

Art and science. Paleoart is the scientific reconstruction of extinct life. Complementing the study of the fossil record, paleoart has becom

#outside sources #hominids #human ancestors

Any advice on intraspecial variation? I struggle a lot with making my nonhuman designs visibly recognizable as a specific character, especially in sketches where I'm not using colors.

a very good question! when we get away from human character design, and we're trying to make our own distinct fantasy people species with consistent traits, it can be difficult at first to make unique character designs within our own constraints.

I think this post showing a bunch of character art from Dungeon Meshi is a very helpful study resource on the matter:

💬 7 🔁 6417 ❤️ 12083 · I love the variety of looks between members of the same race that is displayed in Dungeon Meshi. THIS IS HOW IT SHOU

some important things to keep in mind:

make sure you know what traits are essential for each of your people groups. hair/eye/skin colors they can have, how much their hair texture can vary, what general shape their facial features need to be and also how much they can vary without losing their distinct traits. all that.

practice diverse human faces to get used to the little variations and get some idea of how to design your non humans to also have variation

practice diverse body shapes because muscle and fat are very useful tools for making unique character designs

practice drawing people of different ages, because this is also a very useful tool for making unique character designs

and that's all before we get into things like scars, tattoos, piercings, hair and clothing styles, and visible disabilities or other physical differences that can add individuality to a design.

and here's some examples of my own:

(image description: three rows of grayscale sketches, showing individual character designs for different people species, as bust portraits. Row one is elves, row two is gnomes, and row three is goblins. Each character has different features like their nose shape, skin color, eye shape, ear shape, or hairstyle. Some have piercings, glasses, or hair accessories, and their ages are also varied. Every character in each row also has similar traits based on their species. All the elves have long ears and a rounded bit of darker skin on the sides of their noses. All the gnomes have a pig-like snout and similarly pig-like ears. All the goblins have whiskery barbels and big eyes with horizontal pupils. Two of the goblins are more aquatic, with frilled gills instead of the bat-like ears of the less aquatic goblins. end description)

hope that helps! the more you practice, the better you'll get at it. do some sketch pages of nameless random characters, age up or age down your current characters, change their hairstyles, etc. maybe just make a page of different facial features so you can focus on their shapes. eventually, making unique character designs becomes a natural part of the process! you can also look for character trait generators and take their prompts for quick character design practice.

here's a few so you don't have to dig through the annoying pile of ai ones an internet search might toss at you:

Character description generator. Find a description for your fantasy character.

Need a quick character suggestion or an idea for an OC? Generate one with the click of a button! Perfect for creating NPCs.

#outside sources #character design

heya! I was wondering if you could perhaps help with concepts for a monster design that has been eluding me.

to put it simply: what are your thoughts on designing something eldritch? a physical form but not, something that hurts to look at but might benefit from having a proper way to depict, mostly for art reasons. I keep coming back to concepts that still feel too rooted in reality for something that is ostensibly outside of it.

the character I specifically am trying to design for has space and snake theming that I've been circling around, but in general, I'd be interested in hearing what your approach to describing the undescribable might be.

admittedly, eldritch design is not my strong suit! but I think it works best when it can only be seen in small portions. eldritch horror is all about the unknowable, things that are so impossible to wrap your little mortal head around that being able to perceive all of it will drive you mad.

I can't find it, but there's a tumblr post somewhere that describes it like, if an ant crawled around on some computer parts, it would not understand what it was interacting with. the eldritch horror comes from the ant briefly being able to understand what a computer chip is, and then returning to normal ant life. it knows that it had some special understanding of this unusual thing, but now it can't remember all the details, and trying to explain this to other ants would be impossible.

odd little metaphor, lol but basically if you're designing an eldritch entity, you shouldn't design it as a whole thing necessarily. just bits and pieces, disconnected and obscured. the point of it is that it cannot be described, but it's also kinda boring to not describe any of it!

for a space snake theme, you can describe scales that are darker than the night sky, but somehow full of glimmering color. cold and smooth, in a way that burns. maybe describe the smell of it! outer space apparently has a smell, astronauts have described it:

Outer space has a particular stench. But why?

the common theme of these scent descriptions is "burnt". the descriptions make me think of the times i've been in historical reenactment blacksmith shops. there is a very particular smell in all that heated metal.

basically, just pick like 3-5 specific details you can describe, and leave the rest of it up to imagination.

#eldritch design #outside sources

What would it take for a creature to be able to swallow a modern soldier whole, without too much difficulty, and not be concerned about the kevlar or other indigestible parts like radios? They already hack up anything they can't digest (like an owl), but would they get poisoned? Not a vore thing.

(btw they're smart enough to know that kevlar is inedible. They mostly do it to scare and demoralise their enemies and really disrespect them, it doesn't have to be practical but shouldn't be *harmful*. They're also the partially radiotrophic life I mentioned earlier, if that changes things)

I'm thinking they have really strong muscles that crush bones and organs in the throat, they don't need the victim to be alive during swallowing let alone in the stomach. In the stomach... probably really strong acid? I have no idea.

firstly, they'll obviously need a mouth, throat, and stomach large/flexible enough to swallow a whole adult human.

consuming whole prey like this is common for reptiles and birds, so you can look up how they get rid of the inedible parts of their prey for inspiration!

for example, owls! probably the first animal that comes to mind when you think of a predator that can sort out the indigestible parts of its prey.

here's an article that goes into detail on how they do it:

How Owls digest and process their food and produce pellets

but to sum up, first their food goes through a sort of pre-digestion stage by getting covered in enzymes, and then the gizzard acts like a sieve. while the softer fleshy stuff is dissolved, it can pass through, and the stuff that doesn't get dissolved, like bones, stays in the gizzard to be compacted into an owl pellet.

so for a creature that can swallow armored humans, all they'd need is a strong enough enzyme/stomach acid to digest flesh, and enough space between armor pieces for that flesh to be exposed to the enzymes. the flesh gets all gooey and passes through the filtering organ, the indigestible bits are left behind and coughed back up as a pellet or something.

man, don't you just love it when nature has already figured out how to do the wacky fantasy/scifi stuff you want to write? it's so convenient.

#digestive system #alien biology #outside sources #owls

What kind of muscles would a really jacked merm* have? For my Mermay I'm doing mermifications of some extant characters, and I haven't YET hit the problem of "this character has Muscles as a major part of their visual design" but it's only a matter of time. (I'm poor-to-middling when it comes to knowing what muscles a really jacked HUMAN would have, but that's something I can easily look up reference for.) Do fish / eels / snakes even put on muscle? I have to assume that pinnipeds do because they're mammals, but also that it's not visible beneath the layer of protective fat.

*I've been using the term "merm" as the gender-neutral version of "mermaid" or "merman", it's shorter and easier to say than "merfolk" or "merperson".

fish muscles are pretty wacky! I don't think they build up muscle as much as mammals can, but if they did it also wouldn't look the same.

here's a diagram I found (source link)

(image description: diagram of a fish showing off the muscle layers, which are shaped in layers going from the front of the body to the tail. end description)

and if you've ever eaten fish, you'll have some experience seeing those layers in person and know that the bones of the fish are also interspersed between the muscles.

and here's another image (source link has a little more info on how the muscles work)

(image description: another diagram of fish muscles, showing them from the side as well as in cross sections. here, it's more clear that the muscles get denser and have more curled layers closer to the tail compared to the front of the body. end description)

from the attached source: "

In general, when fish swim, they reduce resistance by folding their fins back and fluttering their tails rapidly. But when they swim in choppy water such as when an obstacle like a downed log or rock creates turbulence, their fins relax and their bodies flap from side to side like a flag blowing in the wind. In essences, the fish move back and forth using the force of the water more than their own muscles."

so in essence, fish don't rely on muscle strength the same way other animals might. and their muscles are set in such layered ways, that if they do build up more muscle, it won't show very distinctly because it will just increase the size of the whole body. they don't have nice clear muscle groups that can get "chiseled" to shape.

so a merm with big muscles will likely only have visible muscle shaping around the arms and pectoral area, as they'd need more specialized muscles for the complex limbs compared to the fishy lower body.

#merfolk #mermay #fantasy anatomy #outside sources

Do you know where to find any references for how bird wings would develop as a winged character ages? Like hatchling, juvenile, adult, etc? And how to compare that to human ages, like what would wings for a toddler look like vs a teenager? What age would they start learning to fly do you think? I've been trying to search myself, but search engines aren't giving me what I'm looking for :( Tysm!

If you look for "baby bird growth stages", especially for bird species that are more commonly kept by people (budgies and cockatiels, pigeons, ducks, chickens) you can find a lot of photo series showing the whole process of growth.

Keep in mind, chickens and ducks in particular develop differently from many other birds. They are more fluffy and able to walk around shortly after hatching, while other bird species will be helpless bald nuggets for several days before they get any feathers at all.

And here's a video I found documenting the growth of a pigeon:

#wings #baby birds #outside sources

Hi! This is a relatively minor question, but -

I'm designing a semi-aquatic humanoid species that can close off their nostrils when going underwater (a la seals), and now I'm wondering how much I would have to change human anatomy to make that possible. Do we have the same muscles seals use, or would my species need a slightly different set-up?

they would need a totally different nose structure!

here's a little video that shows off the way a seal opens and closes its nostrils:

(video description: short clip of a seal in an ice hole, poking its nose above the water and opening its nostrils wide to take short breaths. each time its nose dips under the water again, its nostrils close up super tight. end description.)

essentially, seals actually have to work to open their nostrils, as the closed up state is their relaxed position! this makes sense, because it allows them to focus on swimming without worrying about intentionally holding their breath.

so to do this on a humanoid face, I think you'd have to remove the stiffer cartilage of the nose and create a softer flat nose instead. and then the facial muscles around the nostrils would relax in a flattened and closed off position, keeping the nose closed up tight. they breathe through their nose by flaring their nostrils. humans can already flare their nostrils, just a little bit, so just beef those muscles up and that should work.

they will also need modified ears to keep the water out, sealing closed in a similar fashion.

(image description: sketches of a humanoid face in profile and from the front. they have a very flat nose with nostrils that close up as vertical slits, and ears that have a large flap covering the ear canal. the lower two sketches show the nostrils flared open and the ear flap angled out to open the ears. end description.)

#aquatic humanoid #pinniped #outside sources