Digital cel-shaded artwork of a Tully Monster, which is a hagfish-adjacent pink wiggly worm fish from the Carboniferous. It has a long, ribbed body with soft pink flesh, encased by protective slime that imbues it with a purple hue. It has a tear-shaped fleshy tail, primitive ‘pore’-shaped openings lining its sides for gills, zero limbs, and a head that is probably going to take a hot minute to describe well so hang on a second because I might as well write my will and testament at the same time. Okay. Here we go. Its eyes are shaped like a preschooler’s craft project, with each orbit glued onto either end of a narrow stick, and the stick has been awkwardly glued onto the creature’s head, right on top, no care for aesthetics. It has a long, stiff trunk. There is a raised hole in the trunk’s base on the front of the head that could be a misinterpretation of other reconstructions on my part, because I have no idea why there would be a hole there. The trunk itself looks very unbending cartilaginous to me on most reconstructions, with a stiff ‘elbow’ in the middle to bend it. For this composition I chose to make the trunk even bendier. The trunk has a fun surprise in the shape of a beaky mouth full of too many lamprey teeth. So what is this tully monster even doing here? It is suspended inside of a pond over an isometric chunk of pondscum-covered dirt and rocks. Tiny pinecones have fallen into this pond, as well as some twigs and stray pine needles. The tully monster hoists a spare pine tree branch over its head, with no idea what to do with it, because during the Carboniferous trees were literally just stacking up with nothing to break them down and return them to whatever cosmic hole the Tully Monster slithered out of. Watermark: http://hmcgill.art
Day 21: Tully Monster
"I Can't Believe It's Not An Invertebrate!" might be the worst margarine brand name ever. What do you think?
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