More work from the second phase of Bots Battleground Designs.
The Copycat was designed to function as a scanner so wanted to keep it looking very observant with the laser and large optics.
The Cash was billed as a mecha piggy bank so decided to weaponize it as a boar with missiles for tusks and 3 cannon nostrils with a vault door on the side for added security.
For more information about the game, check out the successfully funded KickStarter page!
I've had this work sitting around for awhile and finally getting some of it posted!
Wanted to keep the Circuit light and agile looking and took some cues from WIFI routers to flesh out the look of a hacking capable design.
Originally billed as a ghostly like translucent robot things changed and now only its spinning neck blades are incorporeal. The world needs more bladed ponchos in my opinion.
For more information about the game, check out the successfully funded KickStarter page!
I swear I can find some time to meet up with you!
A few weeks ago I got my hands on an iPad Pro + Pencil and finally had time to work through my first piece on it.
I immediately gravitated towards Procreate, and after a few sketches and rendering tests to get into the swing of things I dove into this guy. As a digital artist who hasn't kept a traditional sketchbook in quite some time I have a feeling that this hardware and software will be a liberation for me!
Wanted to explore the ramifications of a lava powered milling wheel as explored on the last set of thumbs I worked on. Took longer than it should have as I navigated my compositional blind spots but had some great help from some great friends.
Dipping back into daily sketches using prompts from Concept Art Sessions. I got out of the habit when a big job rolled my way and only am now starting to get back into the discipline.
Thumbs - "Charred" + "Stony"
Last but not least here is the promotional illustration I did for the box art.The goal was to have 4 bots fighting within a set ratio and with a border that faded to black.
A big shout out goes to my friends who helped me with the layout, posing and readability of this piece. Your feedback helped me immensely!
And that is it for now! Be sure to check out the Kickstarter if any of this interests you and hopefully there will be more to come!
The "Menace" is another of the FX laden bots that will probably need to be revisited. Embarrassingly I hadn't had many chances to paint electricity and so after arriving at something passable we decided to move on and circle around once the project clears. I wanted to post it regardless because I like the design and didn't want things to seem like everything was on cruise control on my end.
The "Swarm" was the last bot done for the initial run and took by far the longest at around 9 hours due to its requirements and back and forth. For simplicity and budget sake I turned the component bots into glorified rectangular prisms with little legs and triangle eyes and tried to blend them together into the bot's blob like form. It mostly worked out well and I really love the idea of them heating up to melt down scraps in order to recycle them into the swarm.
Check out Bots Battleground and Boogie Dice over on Kickstarter!
The "Boom" was fairly straight forward as a suicide bot. I only needed 4 thumbs and 3 of them incorporated the Sea Mine shape as its core from the start. I wish I had had the time to do a quick block model of the sphere and detection horns to keep them properly distributed and in perspective but I think it came together well as is.
The "Leech" was a bit on the complicated side but came together as something you wouldn't want to hug you so... Mission accomplished!
Check out Bots Battleground and Boogie Dice over on Kickstarter!
This is the "Underdog" and the "Ricochet" - and they both were challenging for different reasons.
The Underdog is probably my favorite of them all and had to represent a bot that got more powerful when at a disadvantage and I am hoping most of that is expressed in its pose.
The Ricochet on the other hand posed lots of FX problems on my end due to the timelines for each bot. This is one of the few bots that I may come back to to polish up.
Check out Bots Battleground and Boogie Dice over on Kickstarter!
Here are the first few cards I did as a warmup to the project and style. At this point I didn't have an environment backdrop but the poses mostly matched the perspective... mostly...
A big goal here was finding the right blend between chibi and realism. The term "bot" should envoke a different feel from that of a "mech" for instance and to me and the client should be a bit more lighthearted in a way that might not be seen within other genera of robots.
The detail levels here are a bit higher than the rest of the bots before ultimately shifting down due to time constraints but the drift isn't too major I think. Another aspect that I needed to work around was the potential for late state color changes and/or team color changes. To do this I rendered the bots in full black and white and then masked in the primary and secondary colors for super easy future changes and management. This isn't a perfect solution but worked within my budget and carried over into the final promo illustration.
Anyway, here is the archetypical "tank" and "glass cannon" bots to start things off.
Check out Bots Battleground and Boogie Dice over on Kickstarter!
Over the past month I've been creating cards for a Digital Dice / Card game Kickstarter called "Bots Battleground". Each card was around 5-6 hours in the making with a few exceptions - and if the thing gets funded I'll have a whole lot more on my plate.
Beyond finding a style and creating an assembly line of layers I really enjoyed using my new found generate feature to effortlessly save off comps into shared dropbox folders. I love Photoshop...
I'll be posting a few of the bots I've done over the next few weeks as the campaign unfolds and if you know anybody who is interested in a game or dice like this please send the link forward!
