Visual Inspiration

Visual Inspiration pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

Visual Inspiration: Indian Black Narrowmouth Frog

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The Indian black narrowmouth frog (Melanobatrachus indicus) is a vulnerable species endemic to wet evergreen forests in southern India.

Wikimedia Davidvraju Melanobatrachus indicus

Not much is known about them outside of academia and/or research circles (and I’m currently too sick to start combing through more in-depth sources). They seem to be quite small, though. And how cute are those tiny blue polka dots! And its face, too! At least this individual looks so smart it could easily be the model for a dungeon boss for a computer game.

Image by Davidvraju via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Visual Inspiration pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

Living Vicariously Through Social Media: Ringneck Snakes

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I’m not a great friend of cold-blooded critters in general. The ringneck snake (Diadophis punctatus), however, does fall close enough to my sense of cute to bring up. Especially the juveniles—soooo small!

Flickr Tony Iwane Pacific Ringneck Snake

Even the adult ringnecks are quite small and slender, about 21-36 cm (8″-14″) long. The belly and underside are bright yellow, orange, or red, and there often is a ring of the same color around the neck. The 14 non-poisonous subspecies are found in much of the United States, central Mexico, and south-eastern Canada in a wide variety of habitats.

Apparently, the coloring can also shift along the length of the body, like on the prairie ringneck snake in the photo below.

Flickr Peter Paplanus Prairie Ringneck Snake

This type would be especially handsome as a ginormous fantasy version, perhaps even as a rideable creature, a little like the sandworms on Dune or oliphaunts in The Lord of the Rings with war-towers on their backs.

Images: Pacific ringneck snake by Tony Iwane on Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0). Prairie ringneck snake by Peter Paplanus on Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Visual Inspiration pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

Visual Inspiration: Greater Blue-Eared Starling

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The greater blue-eared glossy-starling (Lamprotornis chalybaeus) is a common bird in parts of Africa. It’s as handsome as handsome gets—absolutely gorgeous!

iNaturalist petermcintyre Greater Blue-eared Starling

This stunning starling breeds in a band of land stretching from Senegal in the west coast all the way east to Ethiopia, and south again through eastern Africa to northeastern South Africa, northern Botswana, southern Namibia, and northern Angola. They live in subtropical forests, savanna, and shrublands.

I’ve always found the English name starling lovely—certainly lovelier than the Finnish one (kottarainen)—but the looks of the common starling haven’t, sadly, quite lived up to the name in my mind. Now, the greater blue-eared starling is quite something else! It would be so remarkable to see a turquoise-blue murmuration in a fantasy production, wouldn’t it?

Found via Herps and Birds on Tumblr.

Image by petermcintyre via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0)

The Visual Inspiration occasional feature pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

Greenhouses Fill the Almería Peninsula in Southern Spain

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Aerial photographer Tom Hegen documents the extensive impact of human presence on earth and the traces we leave behind. His Greenhouse Series II deals with the Almería peninsula in southern Spain, where most of the available land—both flatland and ridges—is covered with greenhouses.

Tom Hegen Greenhouse Series II 09
Tom Hegen Greenhouse Series II 04

The stunning scenery reminds me of a tightly-built agricultural area or East Asia’s terraced rice fields, if the crops were all white, or perhaps snowy fields separated by hedges.

While I have some admiration for the productivity (30 times higher than average European farmland, apparently) and efficient land use, the accompanying plastic waste and pollution are unacceptable and unsustainable.

However, I could easily imagine seeing something like this on a not-quite-terraformed world in the Alien movies, for example, or one of the more dystopic locations in the Star Wars franchise.

Found via Colossal.

Images by Tom Hegen

Visual Inspiration pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

Visual Inspiration: Whiskered Treeswifts

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Whiskered treeswifts (Hemiprocne comata) live in various subtropical or tropical forests in Southeast Asia.

Macaulay Library David Cathy Cook Whiskered Treeswift

They remind me of swallows, but are more colorful. Especially the combination of grey plus blue in the wings and back appeals to me.

Setting personal color preferences aside, wouldn’t it be so much more interesting to read a secondary world fantasy story with, say, messenger birds that look like whiskered treeswifts rather than the uninspired and unoriginal corvids?

Yes, corvids are AMAZING birds, but they’re used EVERYWHERE. Could they not be replaced by something else in a fantasy story? Or at least made vibrantly colored?

Image by David and Cathy Cook via The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Macaulay Library

The Visual Inspiration occasional feature pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

Visual Inspiration: Steller’s Sea Eagle

Erik

Here’s a bird of prey with a different look. The Steller’s sea eagle has white bands at the front of its wings, on its legs, and on its tail. It also has a short, thick yellow-orange beak.

Steller’s sea eagle at rest on ice, photograph by Michael Pinczlits via Wikimedia

The normal range of this eagle is along the coasts of northeast Asia from the arctic to Japan, but in recent years there have been sightings as far away as Texas and Nova Scotia.

Steller’s sea eagle hunting, photograph by Julie Edgley via Wikimedia

I’d love to see more birds like this in media, not just the usual suspects like the bald eagle and red-tailed hawk.

Visual Inspiration pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

Visual Inspiration: Frog Lives up to Its Name

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The mossy frog or Vietnamese mossy frog (Theloderma corticale) comes from Southeast Asia. (Apparently it’s known by many other names, too, like Tonkin bug-eyed frog, but that just sounds offputting, doesn’t it?)

Flickr Smithsonian National Zoo Mossy Frog

Not the only animal with camouflage to play dead when threatened, the mossy frog does it cuter than others, if you ask me. Very effectively, too, if the photo below is any indication:

Flickr mamojo Vietnamese Mossy Frog

Just think if your fantasy role-playing game had a party of player characters traveling through a clearing in a wild, overgrown forest dotted with mossy boulders, which suddenly started moving… and turned out to be huge frogs! Or a secondary world story with villagers somewhere in the boonies struggling to catch and cook these abnormally large frogs before they eat the village’s harvest.

As a total side note: while writing this post I learned that one of the synonyms for camouflage is the phrase plain brown wrapper. I’ve no idea how I’ve never come across that before, but now I know it. It’s one of the joys of language learning to me: you never really stop picking up new words and expressions. 🙂

Images: On a stick by Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Rawpixel via Flickr (CC BY 4.0). Camouflaged by mamojo via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Visual Inspiration pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

Living Vicariously Through Social Media: Tree-lined Road Abloom

Eppu

I’ve been reading more fantasy lately than is typical for me. One of the novels paid more attention to everyday colors than Anglo-American fantasy writing tends to do, which turned my brain onto thinking about colors in our environments.

This photo of a tree-lined road with masses of flowers in Parkview, Johannesburg, South Africa, certainly grabbed my attention:

Tumblr Isle of Skye Tree-lined Road in Parkview Johannesburg S Africa

It’s not that I haven’t seen purple or fuchsia flowers on trees or bushes, or tree-lined roads, or tall trees. I just haven’t seen tall trees with purple flowers lining roads before. Fantastic!

Image by traveltrotters_za, found via Isle of Skye on Tumblr

The Visual Inspiration occasional feature pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

Living Vicariously Through Social Media: Herons in Amsterdam

Eppu

Would you ever have thought large birds could live in cities? I would’ve found it a stretch on the basis of my experience, but apparently in Amsterdam in the Netherlands there is a large urban population of herons. Photographer Julie Hrudová has been documenting them, and the photos are very arresting.

Julie Hrudova Herons Amsterdam on Roofs

Some of the birds seem to be getting quite bold:

Julie Hrudova Herons Amsterdam Indoors Sm

Fascinating, isn’t it? Also, the pictures gives me all sorts of ideas for secondary worldbuilding. I could easily imagine semi-domesticated herons in a story, rather like the reindeer in Lapland.

Found via Colossal.

Images: On roofs by Julie Hrudová. Indoors by Julie Hrudová via Colossal.

The Visual Inspiration occasional feature pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

Visual Inspiration: Cayuga Duck

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The cayuga duck is a breed known for its black to metallic green plumage, and—just like the black squirrels in NYC—to me they look absolutely marvellous!

Flickr Simon Redwood Cayuga Duck

There seems to be disagreement over the breed’s origin, but according to Wikipedia they were popularized around the Finger Lakes region (Cayuga being one) of the state of New York.

Flickr Dana Kee Cayuga Duck

Looking cayugas up also taught me that drake is the English word for a male duck. Live and learn!

Found via Good Stuff Happened Today on Tumblr.

Images via Flickr: side profile by Simon Redwood (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). Frontal view by Dana Kee (CC BY 2.0).

The Visual Inspiration occasional feature pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?