Dahami's Reptoids and Aliens

[Dahami]

Alright. I guess it's time to finally edit the first post in the hope that it will allow the new thumbnail image for my sketchbook to display correctly. This is a subtle revision of the previous version of the "Antarean," a bluish being seen by an experiencer during what was described as a vivid dream. I just hope my editing of the post doesn't adversely affect the forum's ability to recover the old image files from the first several pages of the sketchbook, which seem to have gone missing. I encourage forum users to right-click and save copies of my drawings to their own hard drives for personal viewing. I consider some of my art to be of potential historical importance from a research standpoint. If you feel the same, or simply enjoy looking at my work, please save copies of these files to your own digital collection. - David W. Chace (Dahami), August 26, 2015

The following message was originally posted by Dahami on September 10th, 2008 at 07:24 AM:

This is some old stuff I have. There are some acrylic paintings did in the nineties, and some scans of pencil sketches. In some instances I just used my old digital camera to photograph the art (not the best lighting). My scanner is hooked up to an old computer and its card uses an ISA slot, so I don't set it up very often. When I do maybe I'll put up some more recent work. A couple of the images were colored in Photoshop after scanning.

[awooldri]

Ha! This has got to be one of the funnest pages i have looked at, the work that has gone into them as well is amazing, the few that have the scales are so detailed and awesome!

[TheGnoll]

i think i'm pretty sure you have a passion for aliens and reptoids man, wonder where that might come from hehe

i like the fact some of these are creepy as fuck, but even if they are alien their paintings should still be subject to the rules of form and color theory...so imho they could use some more polishing in the basics of the actual painting and drawing stage
again, really creepy

ciao

[andyhunt]

It's a shame there isn't a bit more progression so far as the amount of work you put into your realism, but it's pretty obvious what you have a passion for and what style you like. Reminds me a lot of the illustrations in the UFO books I used to check out at my local library when I was a kid.

[Dahami]

Thanks for commenting. For the most part I think I have the underlying shape and line work right. One thing that was difficult was trying to come up with a plausible scale pattern based in part on studying reference photos of terrestrial lizards, snakes and/or crocodilians. It required a lot of reworking the scales (the shapes and locations of which are defined by their edges) and was very time consuming. Gray aliens without discernible scales are much easier than reptilian aliens for that reason. There's a lot more that can be done with this, probably using a program like Photoshop or Painter for coloring and lighting effects. I have Photoshop CS3 but I haven't really felt like doing much with these images lately. I'm happy to show them, however.

Many of these are based on speaking with people who report having seen them. In the case of the reptilians, I usually can get some information about the color and general information about the scales ("bumpy like the skin on an iguana's neck" or "overlapping like snake scales" for example). In some cases people just describe the skin as "scaly like a lizard or snake." Few people recall many details about the exact scale pattern, however. The yellowish/khaki sort of reptilian with the breastplate and close-up portrait was an exception. I spent a couple hours with the witness doing a detailed sketch of the face, getting bone structure, scale size/pattern and making notes about coloration. I've always loved lizards and snakes (and dinosaurs), and I wish more of the Dungeons and Dragons and other fantasy representations of reptilian humanoids were done by people with a more obvious appreciation for reptilian scales.

[Bulldawg Creative]

The character designs are great. I agree with TheGnoll, the pieces need more polishing. These pieces lack structure and foundation.

I would like to see some different perspectives, compositions and characters in different environments.

Otherwise, I like them a lot and want to see more. Keep it up.

[DENDROTTO]

i draw aliens to. i like your greys.

[AlexTooth]

have you seen any of these, if so, which ones?

[kidult]

Some great designs - try paint some lizards, insects and stuff to help you with more form, structure and texture - you could take these very far! just keep pushing yourself! Im gonna hit up a museum soon, lots of animals and stuff to draw from!

[StallionOfBeachhaven]

These are amazingly funny, one of the best sketchbooks on the forums.

[DeeLock]

Wow, you know, in a weird way i see these actually working well as a fine art gallery of large canvas paintings...not so much as concept art...

Your getting some football eyes going on but that could very well be intentional...it's hard to crit stuff like this because you don't know where style comes in and technique is intentionally ignored.

[Janos]

NIce originality but just think how awsome they would be renderd correctly with light and colours applied in a studied and correct way! Colours reflect upon eachother, light is not just white, light sources make the aliens pop even more.
Push these and don't rely on them just being your style. A very nice start and a lot of work. So you actually talk to guys who have been visited? Ayn interesting infos you wanna share?

[Dahami]

These images are essentially a study of the variations described by people who report UFO contact/abduction. It's almost all based on research I did in the nineties. For the past several years my spare time has been occupied by computer gaming more so than drawing or speaking to UFO experiencers. I invite anyone out there to use the information on anatomy, coloration and so forth contained in these images to create some alien portraits or scenes of your own. I don't own this research. It's a collaboration and anyone interested is free to participate. Perhaps if someone creates something that I find sufficiently inspiring, I'll even get back into it myself.

BullDawg Creative - I agree.

Abductee - Thanks.

AlexTooth - Not as far as I know, but then, abductees usually report that the memory is affected (i.e., missing time or only partial recollection for certain events).

kidult - Good ideas. I'd love to see you tackle some of these yourself.

StallionOfBeachhaven - Everyone reacts to the images differently. People have different feelings about the different species when they look at pictures of them. Amazingly funny is a good response. As valid as any other. Thanks.

DeeLock - Often the eyes are described as extremely large and somewhat almond-shaped. They seem to wrap around the side of the head more than human eyes. In the case of the insectoids (mantis types) they can be really enormous. Alien eyes, if the you could see them through the skin and the skull, might not be so nearly spherical as human eyes. As for style, my goal has been to try to keep stylistic influence to a minimum and try to document what the witnesses have reported to me. When I have worked with them in person we generally got to the point where they were satisfied that we had a pretty good likeness of what they saw.

Janos - Thank you and I agree. I could go a lot further with this. About fifteen years ago when I was recently out of college, that was a central goal of my life. I wanted to help prepare people for the day when these beings were out in the open. I have since concluded that they may never really come into the open, at least not during my lifetime. I also respect anyone who says they don't exist, as there's never been any proof of that. Of course, for the work I'm doing here the question of their objective reality is largely irrelevant. People report seeing them, and there are a lot of commonalities among the descriptions. I'm just interested in visually documenting what people report. I'll get more active with this again some day. In the meantime, I've only got a couple of weeks left before they shut down the servers on Tabula Rasa.

[JellevdVegt]

hmm, your drawings suffer from a very high amount of flatness.. you almost use no artistic tricks to create the illusions of depth.. i dont see 3d form in your drawings, so i couldn't say anything about the design in 3d, i mean you couldnt make a 3d model from your drawings. actually, your designs are very generic. if you get more knowledge about 3d forms and anatomy, you can play with it and come up with more original stuff...

sorry for being harsh but this is what i think.

[JellevdVegt]

ooh, i just read your posts and i understand its drawn as people described it or something, so nevermind that originality bit

[Adrian Wilkins]

man you sseem to be working pretty damn hard, thts a really good thing! but don't forget your anatomy mate!

bookmarked..I'll stop by once in a while

[Dahami]

Here are some more sketches I found on my hard drive. They include an interpretation of a Star Wars Trandoshan alien as a reptoid, as well as a reptoid based on Enik the Altrusian (Sleestak ancestor) from the '70s TV series Land of the Lost. Obviously those are not based on eyewitness testimony, but with a little re-imagination, they do resemble some of the critters UFO abductees have described.

The Trandoshan image is important because I showed the teeth. I've only met one person who gave me a good description of the teeth and she said he had Willem Dafoe's smile (i.e., small, jagged, uneven teeth). No offense to Willem Dafoe intended. She actually liked her reptoid's smile. From what I can infer the dentition is somewhere between reptilian and mammalian. In other words, there's some suggestion of differientation of teeth as you see in mammals, but the teeth do have the jagged, uneven quality you see in reptiles such as lizards. People are usually transfixed by the eyes, and don't get a close look at the teeth even when the beings open their mouths (not very often as they communicate telepathically).

I've also included some experimentation with different types of reptoid heads, based mostly on sketches by different abductees/experiencers. As you can see there's some variation in what's being reported. Common features typically include vertical slit pupils, some kind of ridge or plate-like scales on the forehead, and a stubby reptilian muzzle or snout. In some cases, however, the face is relatively flat like a human or "Gray" alien. Reptilians usually have well-defined muscles and thick tendons on the neck.

If you're interested go find some UFO abductees in your area and work with them, or just start drawing from imagination or use my images as reference. I'd love to see more talented artists drawing these reptilians as they are really cool looking. I'm tired of seeing Internet postings that talk about the reptilians but don't include any pictures.

These drawings were done with a mechanical pencil and cleaned up in Photoshop.

[nakatoni]

Totally not my subject but still I can see you could improve a lot. But other than that I can see it is a sketchbook so... Anyways last ones are those I like the most, some more shading on scales would add depth to your drawings.
Keep it up

[Dahami]

Teh Gosu, I wanted to include enough detail on 3D form for other artists who look at these to be able to render them from multiple angles, which is why I painted the portrait of the slender reptilian being with the huge yellow eyes from three different angles (the witness actually sculpted a small model of the head/face of that one for me). But I can see your point regarding some of the images where I only have the front view. In some instances all I had was one meeting with the witness at a restaurant, and only one drawing was created. Sometimes I am attempting to "reverse-engineer" a rough sketch from a witness who is not a trained artist, using whatever visual knowledge of anatomy and biology I can bring to it.

Hygami, you have the potential to be a truly great fantasy artist. Some of your work reminds me of Todd Lockwood. I am honored that you have bookmarked my sketchbook. As with anyone else who might be interested, I ask you to try drawing some of these beings if you so desire. Maybe you could put some of the reptilians in a fantasy setting with medieval armor like the lizardfolk from D&D.

So, I'm kind of asking other people to do my work for me, but for those who are interested, it's more a matter of taking on the work for yourself. As long as people keep reporting these encounters, there will be something for artists to do. And you don't have to be a believer to get involved, you just have to be interested.

Thanks nakatoni, everyone. Yes I can see that I have a lot of room for improvement to reach the same level as many of the other artists in these forums. What I want you to understand is that when I did these I was more concerned with capturing information about shapes, colors, anatomical proportions, and working out possible scale patterns, more so than creating fully rendered paintings with all of the details of lighting and shadow perfectly presented.

I'm sure I'll get back into this at some point, and I'll have more to post in the future.

[the ANGRY filipino]

Hi Dahami!
That last update, those sketches , actually look less flat than the previous ones. That's good!
The first pieces you posted may not have had proper structure, looked flat, but man are they powerful images. I am sure everyone who looked at them got creeped out. I know I did.
That said, putting your passion for drawing aliens and reptoids and mixing that with some solid art basics should make your images more intense.
And I am sure you will have a lot of fun as you learn, and this can help you present these creatures in a whole new way.
( seriously, I have to go turn on the lights now, i suddenly feel eyes staring at me man...)

[Arne Meyer]

Hi there!
You seem to be really into this alien stuff, wich gives you a huge amount of inspiration I see.
You are also very industrious, wich is really important if you want to get better.
Also there is a noticeable progress in your sketchbook even if it is still small.
All your paintings look a bit flat like already mentioned, maybe you want to study color, form and light a bit?
Your new work is a lot better, I especially like the left creature of the last picture, the muscle structure looks right in my eyes and the design is neat.
I think you have the potential to become a great creature artist if you want to.
Good luck!

[Dahami]

ANGRY filipino, thanks. Pencil is a good medium for creating shading effects. Some of the acrylic paintings were almost like foundations and were meant to capture information so that, someday, I might turn them into fully finished pieces. I'm glad the images creeped you out. I guess I did something right.

AM-Artist, thanks. I appreciate your comments.

I've attached a few more images that I prepared for a DLP slide show I did a few years back. One is based on an illustration of a reptilian that appeared in the now-defunct Unicus magazine back in 1994, one is a profile image of a reptilian based on a drawing that was shown at a conference, and one is based on someone I corresponded with by e-mail about something she saw. I never got it quite right, though. It was more animal-like than humanoid, and should perhaps be more slender and bird-like than shown. She called it a mini-Godzilla.

[Dahami]

Pardon the redundancy with this one. I found some scans I had made of pictures I previously posted as photographs.

[the ANGRY filipino]

creepy stuff as always my friend! And I remember watching "V"...always had the hots for the female aliens in their human form...even when they were swallowing rats and your V illustration is so damn sexy!

[Dahami]

ANGRY filipino, I did some colored pencil drawings of Diana from "V" (played by Jane Badler) back in the mid-eighties. My artistic skill was even less-developed back then, but maybe I'll post those someday.

Here are some more.

I did a sketch of the leader alien that Carlo Rambaldi created for Spielberg's 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, mainly to illustrate that it did not have the solid black eyes (without discernible iris or pupil) that modern depictions of the Grays (beginning in the mid-eighties) possess. Earlier accounts such as the Barney and Betty Hill Case (1961) and the Travis Walton case (1975) also lacked the solid black eyes of recent cases.

Here is a sketch of different types of alien hands. The body plan is almost always humanoid, but the hands are quite varied.

I've included illustrations of different alien faces to show some similarities and differences, and there have been some with odd folds of skin across the face, reported in different cases.

Of interest to me was a particular emblem that appeared on the robe of two different beings (at least) who contacted different witnesses I met. Both beings were described as glowing from within by means unknown (bioluminescence?, nanotech?, paranormal?) and I don't think these two people knew each other or were familiar with the details of each other's cases. One of the beings was called Dahami. He was described as resembling a cross between Napoleon and Yoda. He is my namesake for this board.

[Dahami]

Technically the cute gal in the green suit isn't from "V." She was a pilot on a craft occupied by more or less human-looking UFO occupants that someone reported to me back in the nineties. The witness actually wanted me to draw the two male occupants who spoke with him, but I was more interested in the female pilot. A curious feature is that she had colored pupils, rather than the black pupils that terrestrial humans have. I'm not sure what that means. And as with any of these reports, take it or leave it. I just do the drawings and look for corroborating details between cases.

Here are some more acrylic paintings that I had scans of. Again, sorry for the redundancy from my first post. The "glowing goblin" is from a famous case that took place in Kentucky in 1955. The blue one and the yellowish-beige Gray type alien are the sorts of beings that Whitley Strieber wrote about in his best-seller Communion.

This should be it for a while, unless I find some more stuff on my computer, or set up my scanner again. Thanks for checking out my sketchbook.

[Dahami]

One more... A small, child-like being seen at an underground facility.

[Dorkthrone]

I would recommend looking into some anatomy books and looking for form.

[rambolin]

wow,man,you really got the carzy idea!!impressive

[NewmanD]

Dahami this IS A COOL ART!!! You rule dude... nice, NICE ART...!