OK,

Watcher as background, fine and the only realistic option, ultimately.

"'Butterfly' flayed body hanging in the background"

On the general aesthetic of human technology - and the manshonyaggers qualify too - I am heartily sick of the bulldozers-in-space appearance of all the half-arsed imitators of Syd Mead and Ron Cobb's work for the Alien franchise.  They did excellent work there, but as Salvador Dali said, the first man to compare the cheeks of a girl to an apple was very probably a genius, the second was very probably an idiot.

Here's a menu, select from it as you will (or make additions):

ARMOUR

The "Eater" illustrations are to me a benchmark and this:

http://www.smuzz.org.uk/sms047.htm

shows the bulk one would associate with a suit packed with various complex systems and gadgets giving a unique, contingent aesthetic.  I like the fact that it suggests a recognisable human form, but certain parts, such as the helm, make no concessions to anthropomorphism.

Samurai armour.  A cliche, perhaps, but at least a beautiful one.

If you google "negroli" and select "images", you will find fine examples of baroque parade armour.  See the attached image of a shield, for example.  This inspired the gorget (a crescent-shaped neck piece) as much as Giger's "Li 1" that Pallin wears.  However, parade armour is not fighting armour, and the kit worn out in the Night Land is more functional.

I was very impressed by the Cylon centurions in the new Battlestar Galactica.  See attachment.  They're inspired by Epstein's The Rock Drill, as were the phantoms in the Final Fantasy film, FWIW.  Now of course you can't fit anything human into that wasp-waisted shape!  However, the broad planes of the centurion's armour are suggestive of what a human would look like if we had exoskeletons, and would suggest a culture that is both dependent upon technology and determined to treat it as art.  People go out, or Go Out, into the Night Land as demonstrations and tests of their essential nature, and so there is a certain ceremonial aspect to their expeditions and it would be logical that aesthetics would play a part in the design of their armour.  There may well be ornamentation as the individual adventurers carry with them the pride of their clans, so various family motifs and suchlike would probably be included, either worked in if the armour was made by an artist, or painted on in the manner of the art that was applied to aircraft in the First and Second World Wars.

MANSHONYAGGER

Probably matt black.

What comes to mind immediately, something like a stag beetle crossed with a wolf spider as drawn by Ian Miller.  I like Miller's work, but his style is a bit stiff and angular considering the fluidity of movement (and Hannibal Lecter personality) I'd associate with a Manshonyagger.  What intrigues be about stage beetles is that we assume that jaws are part of the head, but in fact the "upper jaw" of a stag beetle is a protrusion of the thorax and not part of the head at all.  Now, there's no need to be literal in imitating its form, but I do like the uncanny aspect there.  As stated above, it's not a bulldozer or an M-1 tank or any version of current technology as popularly represented.  In a continuum, it could at one end resemble a real insect, coconut crab or whatever, and at the other, some pice of beefed-up NASA probe, mixing features that we try to categorise as "bug-like" with a casual asymmetry - yes, it has something we'd call a head, but it's off-centre, and there's this boxy thing and... etc.  However, a NASA probe, while elegant in its own way, would be far too frail for something that is a dedicated fighting machine, designed to withstand serious defences...

The sentinels in the Matrix films?

The Manshonyaggers are all very, very old.  Their scars would have scars, which would have settled down and raised families long ago. They may have simple, rounded beetle-like carapaces, but in all of the ages that they have lived/functioned, they would have sustained damage and repaired themselves many times, creating a dense pattern of marks... and possibly, being intelligent, they would have ornamented themselves, so they may well have a kind of baroque texturing as well.

As a precedent, I suggest the new Battlestar Galactica again - the Galactica itself is zoomorphic, suggesting an alligator in this case, but I read somewhere that the designers were also thinking of human muscles in the design, hence the curves.  The ribs are supposedly some sort of energy-dissipation feature, like the spaced or gridded armour now applied to modern armoured fighting vehicles in Iraq and Afganistan.  I've attached an image of the Big G showing how it looks after it has sustained cumulative battle damage (also, have a look at how it appears in the very last scenes of the final episode, "Daybreak", with buckled and warped plating).  Now, as I mentioned, the Manshonyaggers can self-repair, but they also self-design, so symmetry might not be retained over the ages.  Going back to the stag beetles, there might be some strange distortion of the body form that coincidentally resembles something else.

On the other hand, just to throw a spanner in the works, and to mix metaphors, the look of stealth bombers is cool - very simple shapes, smooth, matt, flowing surfaces, everything that has to be deployed, extruded, is under oddly serrated hatches and flaps.

Again, treat the preceding as a menu, not a checklist.  Personally I like the Galactica look, with a baroque or samurai twist, but I'll be happy with a surprise.

Cheers,

--Brett

---

From: eira.sms@virgin.net
To: bidavids@hotmail.com; pinlighter@btconnect.com
Subject: Night land : Sea of images: Section 3.
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2011 01:19:33 +0000

----- Original Message -----

From: Brett Davidson

To: Andy Robertson ; SMS

Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2011 7:50 PM

Subject: RE: Night land : Sea of images: Plan 'A'.

I do agree; just thinking out loud, really, sieving the possibilities.  

The weirdness of the Watcher is what Lovecraft so often strove to suggest by offering fragmentary contradictory descriptions before declaring that the whole was ultimately indescribable in any human terms.  There's one story whose ultimate horror is the revelation of a gigantic elbow and no more, another in which a monster is revealed to be merely a toe, though the greater beast is left concealed from the reader.  The labyrinth might be its "fingerprints" or wrinkles in its skin, but really it's more the convoluted eddy that it makes in spacetime... OK, I'm rambling again... Anyway, I was thinking by the end of my ramble that the gleaming surface of the eye would be enough.

Again, I'll always accept any decision.

Now is the Watcher partly rugose and partly squamous then? :)

---

From: pinlighter@btconnect.com
To: bidavids@hotmail.com; eira.sms@virgin.net
Subject: Re: Night land : Sea of images: Plan 'A'.
Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2011 15:52:30 +0000

On drawing the Watcher: I agree with SMS.   I can't see how

what is actually an altering reality can be trapped in the narrow focus of an illustration. 

 

There is too much to do in one picture - show Palin, show Meyr, show their relationship,

and somehow also indicate they are on the skin of a gravity- and time-warping entity too

large to picture. 

 

This doesn't rule out drawing Meyr and Palin on the Watcher, of course: it's just that the

Watcher can't really appear except in the form of a tiny fragment backgrounding the action.

 

(I hate it when people second-guess my thought processes, but I wonder, Brett, if you are

not perhaps applying some of the rules of film to this different medium?? But OTOH this

background fragment of the Watcher may be close to what you are suggesting in your last)

 

 

One point that is probably made irrelevant by the above is that I've always regarded

Fabian's illustrations of the Watchers and particularly the South Watcher as canonical:

so far as that can be meaningful in a much later era when they have developed such

force they can no longer be directly viewed by human beings.   Just a referent for things

like images seen on background viewscreens, etc.

 

On drawing the Watcher: I agree with SMS.   I can't see how

what is actually an altering reality can be trapped in the narrow focus of an illustration. 

 

There is too much to do in one picture - show Palin, show Meyr, show their relationship,

and somehow also indicate they are on the skin of a gravity- and time-warping entity too

large to picture. 

 

This doesn't rule out drawing Meyr and Palin on the Watcher, of course: it's just that the

Watcher can't really appear except in the form of a tiny fragment backgrounding the action.

 

(I hate it when people second-guess my thought processes, but I wonder, Brett, if you are

not perhaps applying some of the rules of film to this different medium?? But OTOH this

background fragment of the Watcher may be close to what you are suggesting in your last)

 

 

One point that is probably made irrelevant by the above is that I've always regarded

Fabian's illustrations of the Watchers and particularly the South Watcher as canonical:

so far as that can be meaningful in a much later era when they have developed such

force they can no longer be directly viewed by human beings.   Just a referent for things

like images seen on background viewscreens, etc.