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Description
The BHUé-DHā are a race of avianoid sophonts with a wingspan of up to 1.5 meters.
Their bodies are covered in flexible, lightweight scales ranging from light blueish-grey to pure white in coloration that serve to insulate them from cold temperatures and water as well as granting limited protection from injuries. In children, these scales are smaller and more robust, giving their skin a pebbly texture for camouflage. Both adults and children of all sexes exhibit filamentous tufts on the side of their head ranging from yellow to orange and red. Due to a genetic mutation, a minority of BHUé-DHā have blue facial tufts. Since it has become a trend to dye one's tufts blue in recent years however, an exact census is difficult.
Though superficially resembling tetrapods, they actually are highly derived radially symmetric hexapods. Over the course of their evolution, the BHUé-DHā have lost their radial symmetry in favor of a bilaterally symmetric one as they took to the skies, their six limbs becoming specialized to fit their new needs. While four of their limbs are still recognizable as such, their third limb has evolved into a (now ventral) rudder-like organ used for communication and maneuvering, their sixth limb now being used as a tail. This tail assists in taking off by catapulting the BHUé-DHā into the air. Once airborne, it is used as a rudder to steer and balance, allowing the BHUé-DHā to perform quick twists and turns. When not in flight, it is held folded under the body and acts as a stand, leaving the two front legs free for crude manipulation. For finer, more precise manipulation, they utilize a pair of facial tentacles ending in «hands» with a thumb and finger each.

The most important cultural heritage, practice and expression of the BHUé-DHā is pottery. The earliest of their arts, it has evolved from the mud nests of their ancestors. In its humble beginnings, pottery was mostly used to make storage pots resembling long tubes with round bottoms that were set into the mud walls of their cliffside dwellings. No kilns or similar contraptions have been found from that period, which means the pots were most likely fired in open fires. Due to the a fairly consistent style of pottery in all the archeological finds, it is believed that they were produced in only a few areas and traded over great distances. Over the years, as the BHUé-DHā refined their techniques, pottery became increasingly important as a way to record their history. At first decorating their pots in applied thin rolls of clay to form pictographs and ideograms, these simple decorations began to represent different, more abstract concepts and eventually developed into a form of logographic writing system consisting of interweaving lines and swirls applied to clay cylinders. To read these highly complicated texts, the BHUé-DHā run their facial tentacles over them, the shape and depth of the grooves between the lines indicating the meaning of the text. Another quirk of that writing system as well as the BHUé-DHā philosophy is that the stories don't have a demarcated beginning or end, oftentimes even able to be read from either side.

Unfortunately, many of these historical texts have been lost due to rampant industrial and military activity in an age of great expansion and conflict which ravaged their homeworld's surface, turning it into an endless, uninhabitable wasteland. To escape the intense heat and solar radiation, the BHUé-DHā have gone back to their roots, building their cities into the sides of cliffs and rock spires, mimicking the nests of their ancestors. As a response to the tragic loss of habitable land, the BHUé-DHā now rely solely on clean, renewable energy, cooperating with other species to further spread and refine the technology, on theirs and on other planets. The fringes of their new, littoral cities are marked by numerous power plants making use of the relentless winds and solar radiation. This development has not yet reached every part or every inhabitant of the planet however, as there are some that have ventured further from their cliffside cities, establishing mining sites or reclaiming still useable materials and cultural goods from the abandoned cities to sell for profit – oftentimes to foreign investors. These mining syndicates are shunned by the littoral cities as they are seen as harmful to their already ailing planet and because they take cultural and monetary wealth off the planet. Because of this, the syndicates often attract poor and down on their luck individuals hoping to make it big and maybe even find a better life for themselves on another planet. Unfortunately, these dreams are usually cut short by the harsh working conditions on the sun-blasted tablelands.
Apart from the BHUé-DHā themselves, multiple foreign companies have set foot in the wastes to profit from the leftover riches, oftentimes either merging with local syndicates or opposing them, sometimes even in armed conflicts.

UNITY intervention aims at strengthening a local, future-oriented culture as well as supporting the preservation of the BHUé-DHā cultural heritage while also putting an end to the further ravaging of this world.

© by me

It’s almost been a year since my last upload for this project so it was high time to get a new sophont up.
I have actually been working on a couple other digital sophont pieces in that time but the first one of those was too similar to the last upload so I decided to upload it at a later date and for the second one, I just did not manage to get it to look right.
Nevertheless, it’s a project that I’m still working on a lot, even creating additional and concepts and texts to be turned into a sort of Index of Sophont Species that I could then release as a pdf or maybe even as a print.
I’ve also been experimenting a bit with different styles, trying out something a bit more quick and painterly with this one

Background:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia…
res.cloudinary.com/wired-de/im…

Description
The BHUé-DHā are a race of avianoid sophonts with a wingspan of up to 1.5 meters.
Their bodies are covered in flexible, lightweight scales ranging from light blueish-grey to pure white in coloration that serve to insulate them from cold temperatures and water as well as granting limited protection from injuries. In children, these scales are smaller and more robust, giving their skin a pebbly texture for camouflage. Both adults and children of all sexes exhibit filamentous tufts on the side of their head ranging from yellow to orange and red. Due to a genetic mutation, a minority of BHUé-DHā have blue facial tufts. Since it has become a trend to dye one's tufts blue in recent years however, an exact census is difficult.
Though superficially resembling tetrapods, they actually are highly derived radially symmetric hexapods. Over the course of their evolution, the BHUé-DHā have lost their radial symmetry in favor of a bilaterally symmetric one as they took to the skies, their six limbs becoming specialized to fit their new needs. While four of their limbs are still recognizable as such, their third limb has evolved into a (now ventral) rudder-like organ used for communication and maneuvering, their sixth limb now being used as a tail. This tail assists in taking off by catapulting the BHUé-DHā into the air. Once airborne, it is used as a rudder to steer and balance, allowing the BHUé-DHā to perform quick twists and turns. When not in flight, it is held folded under the body and acts as a stand, leaving the two front legs free for crude manipulation. For finer, more precise manipulation, they utilize a pair of facial tentacles ending in «hands» with a thumb and finger each.

The most important cultural heritage, practice and expression of the BHUé-DHā is pottery. The earliest of their arts, it has evolved from the mud nests of their ancestors. In its humble beginnings, pottery was mostly used to make storage pots resembling long tubes with round bottoms that were set into the mud walls of their cliffside dwellings. No kilns or similar contraptions have been found from that period, which means the pots were most likely fired in open fires. Due to the a fairly consistent style of pottery in all the archeological finds, it is believed that they were produced in only a few areas and traded over great distances. Over the years, as the BHUé-DHā refined their techniques, pottery became increasingly important as a way to record their history. At first decorating their pots in applied thin rolls of clay to form pictographs and ideograms, these simple decorations began to represent different, more abstract concepts and eventually developed into a form of logographic writing system consisting of interweaving lines and swirls applied to clay cylinders. To read these highly complicated texts, the BHUé-DHā run their facial tentacles over them, the shape and depth of the grooves between the lines indicating the meaning of the text. Another quirk of that writing system as well as the BHUé-DHā philosophy is that the stories don't have a demarcated beginning or end, oftentimes even able to be read from either side.

Unfortunately, many of these historical texts have been lost due to rampant industrial and military activity in an age of great expansion and conflict which ravaged their homeworld's surface, turning it into an endless, uninhabitable wasteland. To escape the intense heat and solar radiation, the BHUé-DHā have gone back to their roots, building their cities into the sides of cliffs and rock spires, mimicking the nests of their ancestors. As a response to the tragic loss of habitable land, the BHUé-DHā now rely solely on clean, renewable energy, cooperating with other species to further spread and refine the technology, on theirs and on other planets. The fringes of their new, littoral cities are marked by numerous power plants making use of the relentless winds and solar radiation. This development has not yet reached every part or every inhabitant of the planet however, as there are some that have ventured further from their cliffside cities, establishing mining sites or reclaiming still useable materials and cultural goods from the abandoned cities to sell for profit – oftentimes to foreign investors. These mining syndicates are shunned by the littoral cities as they are seen as harmful to their already ailing planet and because they take cultural and monetary wealth off the planet. Because of this, the syndicates often attract poor and down on their luck individuals hoping to make it big and maybe even find a better life for themselves on another planet. Unfortunately, these dreams are usually cut short by the harsh working conditions on the sun-blasted tablelands.
Apart from the BHUé-DHā themselves, multiple foreign companies have set foot in the wastes to profit from the leftover riches, oftentimes either merging with local syndicates or opposing them, sometimes even in armed conflicts.

UNITY intervention aims at strengthening a local, future-oriented culture as well as supporting the preservation of the BHUé-DHā cultural heritage while also putting an end to the further ravaging of this world.

© by me

It’s almost been a year since my last upload for this project so it was high time to get a new sophont up.
I have actually been working on a couple other digital sophont pieces in that time but the first one of those was too similar to the last upload so I decided to upload it at a later date and for the second one, I just did not manage to get it to look right.
Nevertheless, it’s a project that I’m still working on a lot, even creating additional and concepts and texts to be turned into a sort of Index of Sophont Species that I could then release as a pdf or maybe even as a print.
I’ve also been experimenting a bit with different styles, trying out something a bit more quick and painterly with this one

Background:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia…
res.cloudinary.com/wired-de/im…