The Steampunk Pirate!

Another week has passed so it’s time to share another character from the Fusion Earth game that I’ve been working on! This week it’s going to be the Steampunk Pirate, I especially enjoyed designing her gun!

The idea behind these characters, and the game itself is that everything is a mash up of two or more things, the characters usually being a mash up of the two words in their name. The Zombie Viking and Steampunk Pirate idea seemed to have been done many times before, so it was hard to look at reference without being too influenced and copying. I used to be obsessed with pirates and it’s literally all I used to draw, so I decided to gather plenty of reference for Steampunk material and chose to use my own pirate ideas to merge with it. Both I and the client wanted to have a fair share of female and male characters, and I thought that the Steampunk pirate would work well as a female, I’m not great at drawing females so it took me awhile to get that right too.

Because I don’t have much experience drawing females or the Steampunk aspect of the character, I spent a lot of time trying to nail to general look and shape of the character before even worrying about her pose or face. I wanted to get the basics right first, to make sure that when you looked at the character, you could instantly understand what she represented (we also wanted her to look like a strong female who could handle herself without any help), but I also wanted her to have a bit of a twist seeing as the concept has been done so many times already.

Once we felt that the general concept was solid, I worked on the composition of the character and giving her some personality. When researching the steampunk aspect of the character, I also noticed that the steampunk is very intricate and detailed and I wanted to show that in my design. I roughed out quite a few ideas for her outfit until I reached the final design, I knew all along though that I didn’t want her to be a typical busty pirate and over sexualised as it is not the type of work I like to create. When I’m designing armor and weapons I like to think about how it will actually work and function. So for example, her big left arm is mechanical and fuelled by the canisters on her bodice, the reason she has such a big metal arm is so that she can lift the massive gun on her back which shoots cannon balls.

As I said at the start of this post, her weapon was so much fun to design, again I was thinking about the function of it and how it would work in the real world, this got me thinking about how cool it would be if she loaded it with actual cannon balls., which then led me to think about what the gun would look like if she’d made it herself from ship parts and of course, a shark! I came up with the design for the gun pretty quick, but I did sketch out a few more concepts to explore a little more, and although we decided to go with the first choice, I will definitely be coming back to some of these concepts in the future!

As with the Zombie Viking illustration, I’m pretty happy with my style right now and feel confident in my process, so it didn’t take me that long to get the bulk of the illustration finished. However the colours in this one took forever to get right. Whenever I thought I’d got it right, there was always one element where the colours were off, especially with the squid on her shoulder. I tried about 7-8 different colours and nothing seemed to be working. As usual though I think I just needed a break from the piece and once I’d had a few days away, both I and the client settled on orange as a nice contrast against the greens.

I’m pretty happy with how she turned out, I feel like she looks strong and definitely looks like she can hold her own and take charge of a crew. I think choosing to have her holding a cannon ball also gives off the idea that she knows exactly how to use her weapon to her advantage and the eye patch shows she isn’t scared to put up a fight.

I hope you guys are enjoying reading about the development of these characters! If you’re interested in the game and think it’d be something you’d play, be sure to head on over to Twitter and give Influx Studios a follow for updates and current gameplay information about the game.

Here’s a sneak peak at next week's reveal!