ROTIFER

 ROTIFER

"'Oh—nothing,' Harry turned back to his work. As if on after-thought, he explained, 'I was wondering if the rotifers could see me when I'm looking at them.'"

"Mr. Chatham laughed, a little nervously, because the strange fancies which his son sometimes voiced upset his ordered mind. Remembering the dark glistening eyes of the rotifers he had seen, however, he could recognize whence this question had stemmed."

"There was a swarm of them under the lens, and they swam lazily to and fro, their cilia beating like miniature propellers. Their dark eyes stared, wet and glistening; they drifted in the motionless water, and clung with sucker-like pseudo-feet to the tangled plant stems."

"'I won't tell you how to talk to them, because nobody ought to talk to them ever again. Because they find out more than they tell.... They know about us, now, and they hate us. They never knew before—that there was anybody but them.... So they want to kill us all.'"

"He remembered the shapes that swam and crept in the green water gardens, with whirling cilia and great, cold, glistening eyes."

Robert Abernathy, The Rotifers

Read Scott's essay about Abernathy's The Rotifers & Strange Exodus here.

One of the things I love most about Stories From the Borderland is that these aren't stories I would pick to read and thereby creatures I would illustrate. And I love how challenging some of them are. The rotifers for example; trying to illustrate transparent things is alway difficult in my style because everything is so tight and controlled.

Drawing a rotifer is hard enough. As microscopic creatures their anatomy is a bit hard to parse. I used the above diagram & photo for reference.

 Above you can see how I tackled the transparency issue; I drew the organs separately, rendered them, then fiddled with partially erasing them before laying the other textures on top. 

I also need to point out the brilliant Virgil Finlay illustration that originally accompanied this story in the March 1953 issue of IF with a cover by Ken Fagg.

This isn't over! Go look at my other creature based on Abernathy's story Strange Exodus that also posted this week!