Aliens: Jim Cameron's Alien queen egg layer concept art references The Temptation of St Anthony (1946) by Salvador Dali

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Aliens: Concept art for Alien Queen Egg Layer by James Cameron

Concept art for Alien Queen Egg Layer

a) This was the concept art for the scene where Ripley fitst encounters the Alien queen. When Ripley first walk in, the audience doesn't know what they're looking at, this alien beast is hiding in plane sight, as Ridley and Giger explored with the alien beast in the first film. 

The head with the teeth is all retracted up, and the arms are all folded in such a symmetrical way, you don't even know what it is, then you see the ovipositor down to the right of the creature "spitting" out eggs

1. James Cameron: I took everything that's happening on an insect level and blew it up to a much larger scale and took the Giger ethos in the kind of overlaying of it.
   
   So the idea here was, when you first see her you even don't know what that is. There's the idea that Ridley and Giger explored, that it's hiding it in plane sight, she walks in and sees this thing.(From a documentary on the inspiration and design of Aliens that came out online)
2. James Cameron: The business end with the teeth is all retracted up and the arms are all folded in such a symmetrical way, you don't even know what it is, then you've got the ovipositor down here, it's spitting out the eggs.
   

   

   Complete image from magazine about the making of Aliens at the time of the film's release

b) On July 3rd 2018, the realisation came to me that the artist of this piece had the general idea about what the creature should look like and so he used Dali's painting here as a guide to how to lay the composition out.

The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1946) by Salvador Dali

c) The creatures in the Temptation of Saint Anthony by Salvador Dali shows the train of animals with long thin legs and bulky bodies along with a cloud trailing behind, and these forms help the artist to lay out the elongated egg sack

d) With that, I think that the angels wing is adapted to become the lip like form of the ovipositor.

e) The front of the horse with its raised legs and the front of the alien egglayer with the front of the egg sack