GETTING AROUND IS EVERYTHING

Continuing on from my last two blog posts, I will again today be sharing some new work from my latest personal project, so if you aren't sure what I'm talking about at any point please feel free to go back to those two posts and catch up!

As I have talked about in my previous two posts, this world isn't as earth is now and because of a disastrous event, the earth has now shattered into pieces and is surrounded by hundreds of thousands if not millions of smaller pieces of land. (Like a much more complex version of the image below).

So obviously in this world you absolutely have to be able to get around, there are huge gaps in between some pieces of land, but each chunk of land also only contains certain necessities, some might just be forest areas full of trees, some might just be shipwrecks and water while others could be market towns full of traders of all shapes and species.

Last week I introduced a character to you (who will be part of a bigger group of this type of character) who gets around by himself, he drops to lower lands by gliding and gets to higher land by climbing up sides of land with his modified suit. 

So how else do they get around?

Well this time, let me introduce the mechanics! Again, these will be a group of characters, some human, some not who will all slightly vary depending on their characteristics and location etc. Here's the first character sheet, however I'm not super happy with this so I'll be expanding on it a lot as I want all of the characters to look and feel part of this world, and be fully adjusted to their surroundings. The main element I want to get across in all of the characters is that they resource everything that they have from what is around them and I don't feel like this design completely gets portrays that idea. I like a lot about her outfit and think her whole head area works well, but I think that her tools and actual mechanic equipment needs improvement.

The idea is that all of the vehicles will be either built completely from scratch, or be modified versions of found vehicles, so knowing how to fix up a vehicle is a sought after and highly rewarded skill. The key is however, they have to have ramped up suspension and powerful nitro boosts to be able to land heavily when dropping to a lower level and jumping up high to a level above. The best vehicles for instance, are modified quads and dirt bikes.

If you're following me on social media (links at the bottom of this page) you'll know that I've been taking part in Inktober and using it to produce work for this project (including the vehicles above). So for one of the days, I decided to draw up an idea for a male mechanic and a creature mechanic. You'll be able to see on these that I played around with the outfits a little more, and although I'm still not super happy with them and would like to push them further, I think in general they're looking like pretty cool guys!

I hope you enjoyed seeing some more characters this week, I'm having tonnes of fun doing this project and although I don't have any specific outcome for it, I'm looking forward to seeing the results in my work and process. If you're currently stuck in a bit of a rut or creative block, start a personal project or set yourself a small challenge, it could even be a simple as completing one illustration. As long as you do something you're passionate about it'll be fun and hopefully kickstart your creative ideas again.