My Own Art
I taught myself Blender during Covid and have been using it on and off since then, coming and going in waves. I've dabbled in some other art mediums over the years and all as well- here's a combination of renders and other art projects, as well as the story snippets I would sometimes add to them.
The heat from the engine of your ship radiates almost as much as the ambient desert heat around you, throwing invisible waves off of every surface in vision. You sit in your underclothes, flight suit in a crumpled pile next to you as you relax on a small portable stool in the shade of one of your ships' wings, hoping for some form of reprieve from the beating sun. Save for the few outposts scattered near the northern pole of the planet and the military outpost you're making your way to at the southern pole, no human life exists anywhere else here. No flora or fauna is present except for a few species of sparse grasses and brush.
You close you eyes, trying to decide if the hot breeze blowing past you is helping or hindering you in your mission to not succumb to heat stroke. After a couple deep breaths, you open your eyes lazily and are met with the distant view of it- a dark silohuette peaking at your through the undulating heat waves, barely discernable as vaguely humanoid. Wiping the sweat from your eyes and checking to make sure it isn't a heat-induced hallucination, you confirm its presence to be around three-quarters of a kilometer out. Even from this distance and through the haze, it seems too large to be human. Its head seems animalistic with some type of horns coming from the sides, like a form of bovid. It stands there, under the sun yet still almost totally pitch black.
It makes no advance toward you, and as you begin to wonder if it is some form of totem made by the now-extinct native peoples, it begins to make steps to the right, slowly attempting to circle your ship. You remember your Gauss repeater is deep in storage in the back of your ship, in pieces to allow the rest of the supplies to fit. You aren't going to chance this. Grabbing your suit with one hand and the ladder into your ship with your other, you pull yourself in to the cockpit without taking your eyes off of the being. You realize your forgot your stool as you pull the canopy over your head and try not to allow the adrenaline coursing through you to turn to uncontrolled fear. No way in hell you're going out to grab it. Engines on, ignore the immediate overheat warning, pray skipping the pre-flight checks for what would be the first time ever doesn't bite you in the ass. Constantly glancing at the being, its when the ship first lifts off the ground that it makes a break for you.
Sprinting at you at full speed with its arms cutting through the air like blades, it closes the gap quicker than you thought would be possible by any biped. Thankfully your ship is meant for quick acceleration to make it out of the small port cities and mountain top outposts you're used to. In seconds you're nearing 75 knots and still quickly climbing, and you peel your eyes off of the airpseed indicator to look out the side to see how far the being is now. You can't see it in the distance, and assume it gave up. But, moving your eyes back in front of you, you see it. Its in the shadow of your ship, directly under you, keeping pace. You yank back the flight stick and beg the machine you're in to not stall at the sudden climb. Immediately you're almost veritcal, heading straight for the clouds, out of reach of whatever monster had just given chase to you.
After getting chewed out back at base for pushing your machine way beyond nominal operating conditions and arriving prior to the base being prepared for you, you head back to make a final post-flight inspection. Under the fuselage, near the back, you see four long gashes cut straight through the alloy body panels, theperfectly aligned to be from the claws of a large five-ginered hand. A small clump of black hair is stuck in the exit point of one of the gashes, slowly swaying in the hot breeze.