Maybe it's not the
best picture of an alien, but it's something special for me.
A friend showed me ALIENS first, and other than the Queen, the aliens are very impressionistic in that film. It's more about how they
move, and how fast they are, and what it looks like to see hoardes of them.
If you'd asked me to
draw an alien after watching that film, I wouldn't have been able to do it. I couldn't visualise them.
Of course, now they're
everywhere.
And this was after the theatrical release had been and gone. The ALIENS movie magazine was long gone. There were no images of what the alien looked like I could find anywhere.
But I came across a book on special effects from the library, and it had this photo in it. And I looked it at for hours, studying it. It was such a compelling image. The complexity of the design enraptured me. I thought the element of the human
skull (which, obviously I hadn't noticed on ALIENS because it wasn't there) was amazing.
I renewed that book several times.
My real love for the ALIEN films, my interest in Giger's artwork, started right here with this exact image.