So, I finally got around to trying SAI, and man is it ever good to be able to use a selector tool again. ArtRage2 is fun and all, but it's definitely not so hot for stumbling beginners like me. Making aliens is hard. You get stuck between trying to make them unique and trying not to over-humanise them. Too alien and they become hard to connect with or describe properly in a story. Too human and they feel, well, like humans, which ruins the aesthetic and kills some of the suspension of disbelief.

The fine-print of the design hasn't been settled yet, but this is one of the dominant spacefaring species in Luros-B. While individuals can have a fair variety in eye positioning, the default is giving me some problems. They're supposed to be clustered at the front of the head, in a tight speckled pattern of sorts, with other eyes running the top of the head and back towards the hood. Just making the ones on the front look right is hard, so I settled for this botched configuration for now. A common feature on them is also a subdued speckled patterning, with the occasional darkened dot (which would have served as camouflage for the eyes way-back-when). Much of this babbling is mostly just for me to refer to, so don't worry about offending me because you didn't read my boring, droning bullshit, heh.

The folds at the neck and the dimpled gaps in the side of the jaw are a two-way gill system, with a sectioned lung inside the neck and slightly inside the collarbone area. Most of the vital organs are comparatively small in size, but supposed to be really efficient. The eyes are pretty simple, little vitreous pockets behind rubbery membranes with sphincters for blinking and protection. The mouth is located under the chin, a muscular pocket ringed with tooth-like structures that serves a simple yet powerful crushing contraction, relying on the stomach to do the hard part.

The cresty flap thing at the back of the head is useless now, but was originally used to disturb the ocean floor to discover it's food. In relation to their current upright status, prior to sapiency, they would have laid on their 'back', using the hood to comb for food (and quickly restrain it once discovered), then the tentacles they used for anchoring and locomotion would be used to transport it to the mouth. The neck would have been mostly invisible, as the chin would be broader and cover it almost perfectly, the lung it now contains would have been something like a bladder to stimulate a flow in the gill area, in places with still water.

Oh yeah, and the tentacles end in singular, flexible bowl-shaped cups a little bigger than the thickness of the limbs. Shalthar are technically very strong, but because of their low body-weight they find close combat more difficult. It's hard to kick someone's ass when no matter how hard you swing, the force pushes you away and leaves them stationary...