Diorama: Autopsy

This is a new diorama illustration for an old story. I have this lofty goal of turning some of my old, outdated illustrations for Odyssey into dioramas. Then I can start phasing out the mishmash of watercolor, digital, and pencil and replace it with a unified series of illustrations all in the same medium or two. Some of the dioramas will have to be remade. The pen stuff can stay for now.
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One Of Those Days

Do you ever have one of those days where you just can’t focus on your job? It could be that you didn’t sleep well the night before, or maybe your morning coffee tasted like lakewater, or perhaps it’s because your job requires you to wade knee-deep in alien guts in the name of science.

No amount of disinfectant will completely wash out the funk from today’s experiment. I’m sure that if we hadn’t brought our own air supply, we could have easily followed our noses to the star walrus that festered on the far shores of Hidden Lake. It wasn’t fresh by any means. We had to drive off the bottlenecks and thraxes that had gathered to feast on the entrails. And that was all that was left, really. Organs of the sort I had never seen in my life: a thick bag lined on all inside surfaces with grinding teeth, a stomach-like sac that branched into several blind pockets, some loose digesta (this went straight into a jar, of course), and the tattered remains of a mouth and throat. Several frayed and gnawed-on bundles of fiber were all that remained of the skeleton. The blood was the same pinkish color as the surrounding red plants.

For this special occasion, our own medic was here to help us reconstruct the digestive system. Luo had taken the place of Rashid, who had stayed behind to work on the plumbing. He swears he isn’t squeamish, but something was definitely making him uncomfortable today. If anything, the dissection seemed to put him at ease. He was much more agitated on the way there, fretting over the fabric of his suit, checking again and again for flaws in the tubing, and looking anywhere but ahead. It’s baffling the way he acts sometimes. Maybe he’s just having one of those days.

- Erin Carellos (Day 9)
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Progress shots:

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