CHIMERA / IMAGO - A stranger things inspired creature design.

Somewhere, in the upside down, tendrils start to spin around multiple demodog's corpses. A chrysalis of bone and decaying tissue is formed, it fuses, it changes, and eventually, they start to pump again, a choir of pulsating hearts. The chitin breaks and wings spread in the mist. They rise again.

Credits to Adrian Bush, whose art was a really good source of inspiration for this piece.

Since Stranger Things is known to take inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons and tabletop roleplaying games, i followed the trend and design a creature revolving the concept of the chimera. In the greek mythos, this creature is described as a a fire-breathing female monster with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail. However, there's a different, more current definition of the creature: an organism that contains cells or tissues from two or more different species. We could argue that creature design is based in the creation of chimeras, but the thing about this amalgam of creatures is that it's fusion is heterogeneous . And i thought that it would be cool that, in the Stranger Things universe, be it by experimentation with upside down tissue in a lab or the physics of the mirroring world, two or more creatures actually grew into each other, merging messily, creating something new.