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Description
It's been a good minute since I've done a landscape piece. Can't remember how this idea popped into my head but I wanted to draw something with "walking crystals" and this is what I came up with. The best way to describe these "Crystal Walkers" in a nutshell is a mix of Diatoms and Portuguese Man-o-War that move at the same rate plants grow. In detail, they are a colony of mineral-eating microbes that incase themselves in a crystalline casing for structure and protection. The majority of the microbes act as a circulatory system that transfers nutrients throughout the colony and expels waste (mostly in the form of their crystal casing). The microbes that congregate in the "legs" extract various minerals in through the porous "feet" along with any other microorganisms that get drawn in though this risks viral infection as well. In the top stalks there are microbes that form yellow clusters that are sensitive to light thus acting as primitive eyes for best determining the colony's trajectory. The way they walk is by continuously growing new legs and stalks at the front and moving through their crystal structure until breaking off the oldest segments in their back while recycling as much of the crystal as possible. If two Crystal Walkers come into contact with each other they merge to allow genetic exchange between the colonies before splitting into three separate Crystal Walkers. As for the world they live on, I'm leaning towards Ross 128 b. It is a terrestrial planet orbiting the habitable zone of a red dwarf star located roughly 11 lightyears away from earth. I decided to make this a so called "germ-world" where virtually all of the life on this world is microorganisms as it's probably the most likely scenario on most habitable planets giving how long life on earth consisted of only microbes. They are shown here as a form of dark-red algae equivalents in the water and dark orange patches along the shores with the Crystal Walkers being the closest thing to macroscopic life in their world.

As Always, comments and critiques are welcome.

Description
It's been a good minute since I've done a landscape piece. Can't remember how this idea popped into my head but I wanted to draw something with "walking crystals" and this is what I came up with. The best way to describe these "Crystal Walkers" in a nutshell is a mix of Diatoms and Portuguese Man-o-War that move at the same rate plants grow. In detail, they are a colony of mineral-eating microbes that incase themselves in a crystalline casing for structure and protection. The majority of the microbes act as a circulatory system that transfers nutrients throughout the colony and expels waste (mostly in the form of their crystal casing). The microbes that congregate in the "legs" extract various minerals in through the porous "feet" along with any other microorganisms that get drawn in though this risks viral infection as well. In the top stalks there are microbes that form yellow clusters that are sensitive to light thus acting as primitive eyes for best determining the colony's trajectory. The way they walk is by continuously growing new legs and stalks at the front and moving through their crystal structure until breaking off the oldest segments in their back while recycling as much of the crystal as possible. If two Crystal Walkers come into contact with each other they merge to allow genetic exchange between the colonies before splitting into three separate Crystal Walkers. As for the world they live on, I'm leaning towards Ross 128 b. It is a terrestrial planet orbiting the habitable zone of a red dwarf star located roughly 11 lightyears away from earth. I decided to make this a so called "germ-world" where virtually all of the life on this world is microorganisms as it's probably the most likely scenario on most habitable planets giving how long life on earth consisted of only microbes. They are shown here as a form of dark-red algae equivalents in the water and dark orange patches along the shores with the Crystal Walkers being the closest thing to macroscopic life in their world.

As Always, comments and critiques are welcome.