This is the mother of many botanoid predators and aliens in SDL InnerSpace
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This image is a last-minute addition to the SDL Origins, rescued from forgotten archives. It was sketched in 1996 in Macromedia Flash and Micrografx Designer, from a bad raster, a poorly rendered splash stain, which I filled with black, because the colors and the resulting texture had turned out so bad. I vectorized it, and that is the black outline around the image. A couple of days later, I edited it in Flash, where I had trace-bitmapped it, and drew the first sketch of the flower, the central orange shape, not as a free-hand or curve drawing, but as a “cloud” of many circular shapes merged into one circular cellular shape. The sketch was edited further, with fine node tuning, and completed in Micrografx Designer.
Conceptually, this is my foundational “mouth-eye flower,” a personal emblem combining eye and mouth to signal sentience and consciousness within SDL InnerSpace’s formal theory. I’ve used this motif since childhood—initially inspired by a documentary on carnivorous plants—so the red evoke a connection to meat, and green appears only in the iris, to create a predator-like impression.
Everything in the composition remains flat except for the lower eyelid-lip, which I beveled when integrating the artwork into the PowerPoint document of SDL InnerSpace Origins. This slight three-dimensional touch should underscore the duality of sight and speech, emphasizing the lip functionality and smile on the eye’s “mouth.”
As the germ of my long-running “botanoid predator” series, this doodle marks the inception of countless surreal, sentient plant-like creatures.
