notasecunit

[notasecunit]

The especially horrible thing about teenage survey interns is that they are always learning. Speaking as a former teenager and now-sometimes-teenager-wrangler; there are no backsies once you teach a kid how to pick locks, which is going to make it way harder to lock said kid in secure safe areas in the future. Good job, third mom. (This sketch is from Network Effect, when Amena follows Murderbot into the possibly-contaminated shuttle in order to bug it with questions about it’s feelings. Amena might be my favorite teenager ever written since she’s both not dumb and still a spaz.)

[notasecunit]

hahah remember that one time when your friend, who was way cooler and smarter than you, convinced you that if you changed your hair and cut 2cm off of your limbs then other people would like you more, or at least stop using motion analysis software to profile and shoot at you?

That friend was definitely an asshole.

I spent a bunch of the day in an MRI so this horrible ¾ down view into ART’s MedSystem is dedicated to that. I would say drawing the complex portions of spaceships is more fun if you’re actively thinking of the entire room as a character, but honestly it’s not. It’s not fun. I had to redraw everything 5 times. (And “9a8b617ab7ee7247ab” is pretty rude but you’ll have to convert it back to binary and then to ascii.) I added the original tiny ballpoint pen sketch so you can see the drift of composition over those 5 re-draws; like all idiots my concept of where ART is slowly drifts up to the ceiling, even though that makes no sense when ART is actually the floor and the walls and the drones. There's also apparently a lot more shit in ART's Medical bay but we have reached diminishing returns on my architectural attention span.

In my mind's eye Murderbot flexes and primes it's energy weapons whenever it's scared, pissed off, or even just really annoyed. Which it only sometimes realizes is extremely intimidating.

[notasecunit]

1. Let's figure out actual clothing designs

2. Oh hey what about drawing a hallway, that seems more fun

3. Draw face, half-ass rest of body

4. Immediately add laser lighting effects

5. Remember this whole exercise was about pants; attempt to draw pants on half-assed body

6. Just start slopping in large blocks of lighting because why not

Holy heck today I learned I'd rather draw a space station than understand cargo pants.

[notasecunit]

Boom, exactly like a human. No problem. Doesn't look like weird behavior at all.

Has anyone counted the number of successful phishing attempts Murderbot has? Because it seems much higher than the number of times it enters physical combat and doesn't get shot. (I guess I'm counting asking other secure network entities politely for things as "phishing", so maybe that's not fair. Are manners just an API for socially engineered pen testing? Is it beyond puns when you take a back door into a cargo hold as your back door?)

Also a thing I wanted to capture-- Murderbot is a paranoid, depressed, partially embodied adversarial network with poor self control produced with sloppy code by corporate looters whose profit model is human slavery. Most of the time it doesn't know what it wants, is constantly spying on every human in any given location, and it's moral compass is entirely based on TV. It is a walking espionage fortress literally made out of guns powered by a battery that can last years, wtf. That's at least a bit distressing to let onto your ship? I'm just saying every skeptical human antagonist in this series has a completely reasonable perspective on things, which is cool, A+ for Gurathin and Thiago. Ratthi clearly has the worst risk assessment game going.

[notasecunit]

I realized I should add a quick note to any future person scrolling through here: I’m designing characters from the Murderbot books with what I perceived as book-universe canon and my own derpy logic, but obviously there’s no right answer.

Please imagine and draw characters however you like! If I sound grumpy it’s because I’m having a conversation with myself on an empty blog late at night about a design puzzle I’m wrestling with. I’ve seen a lot of really cool fan art with entirely different character design choices float by, and I don’t want to sound like I’m judging on any of that! Fan art is always personal.

My goals are just getting myself to art more by sticking to constraints of a story that I really like, with designs that work logically with the plot and universe. I just draw at 1am because I’m stressed and injured and trying to distract myself.

[notasecunit]

I'm posting this here as a confession that I spent hours yesterday working on hair texture trying to calculate how long 6-10cm would be in curls, and also I spent way too much time not succeeding at making a cyborg body designed for killing look awkward enough.

Character Design Angst:

The SecUnit armor should be even bulkier, since the contrast of not being in said armor it is deeply confusing to everyone, especially Murderbot. Also that armor got like 1 minute of sketching and looks like broken noodles...I'll...get back to it. The excellent cover artist already figured that part out and I'm lazy.

Murderbot's hair length after Milu in "maximum sneaky human mode" should actually be startlingly different enough that other people can't recognize it without a long look and some squinting.

The solution to the riddle of someone who grows hair to disguise themselves, don't know what a haircut is, and somehow doesn't have that hair entirely in their eyes is: curly hair that forms semi-perfect loose puffs when extremely neglected. Specifically, I stole this hair from one of the people I went on a weeklong backpacking trip with years ago. Their hair only got more fleek by the day; it was eerie to behold. I have mostly straight hair and I can definitely confirm that running around neglecting hair like that means you have idiot anime bangs stabbing you in the eye during airsoft matches, which is an unacceptable performance reliability loss.

Based on my vague knowledge of population genetics, if you put a lot of humanity in a blender in order to make left-over-parts super-soldiers, curly hair and mid tone skin would DJ the allele party. I feel like a huge sellout for having some base-level character design goals that are the Nots: not the normal human features that get cast as robots (asians, buff white guys, skinny white guys). (Thing is, I look like a tall, sort-of-muscley half-Chinese/half-British, gender(?) person with an undercut fauxhawk, and I mostly wear hoodies and cargo pants, and I just don't want to draw someone who looks like me, that would feel super weird okay?) Also curly hair people get no rep as evil robots, so I'd like to fix this. #ImDoingMyPart

Based on my vaguer knowledge of bending biology to weaponry, if I was asked to design a human that could take a beating and then regrow most of its functionality in 8 hours, I'd force the cells and hormones to grow someone around 17-22, an age when immortality seems most possible and broken joints aren't as much of a thing. So, little to no body fat, twitchy nerves, mostly limbs and augments and no bulky human muscle.

I can't keep facial features very steady since I don't have a very coherent style. This sucks, sorry.

I'm trying for consistant skin tone and hair color, but I'm also doodling on a lot of nightshifted (darker, more yellow) screens, so colors are looking weird.

[notasecunit]

That conversation with the weapons scanners better be going really well

[notasecunit]

In my head, Murderbot is really bad at sitting normally, since it either stood at attention or curled up in cubicles for 87% of its life so far. And I question how accurate actLikeAHuman.actionfile is; ART was the main judge of human verisimilitude (and since ART is basically a weaponized Magic School Bus in space, it hangs out primarily with teenage survey interns and career academics which is going to create a fairly tilted data set of "totally normal human postures".)

[notasecunit]

tiny drones are murderbot's best feature :3

Someday soon: I will draw actual clothing damage instead of lazy multiply layers.

Speaking of layers, the illustration end game is to get all the simultaneous stuff Murderbot is doing into the image at once-- spamming the other boat with trashy TV, calculating shot trajectories and being judgmental about humans, for example.

[notasecunit]

screen time

So I'm thinking that Murderbot wandered around for almost four years without actually being forced to do anything. By the time it was working the PreservationAux gig anyone who was actually paying attention to physical behavior would have seen the undignified struggle of a person working through teenage-level impulse control...binge-watching torrented Netflix, failing to read any of required documentation for it's assignments, throwing bloody armor pieces all over the floor since no one ever comes into the security rec room...

[notasecunit]

[notasecunit]

Let's talk Murderbot fashion.

This bot/human construct has decided to sulk around the galaxy in cargo-pocketed sweatpants, a long sleeve black T-shirt, and it's favorite jacket/hoodie while setting Netflix binging records. While that is all #relatable as shit, it is hard to roll that into a futuristic badass fashion design for a superhero character. Also Murderbot is so generic looking as a human it can disappear in crowds even while having a panic attack, see below for the struggle to figure out hair texture and amount of melanin.

If I complain about the pajama-like outfit it spends 80% of the storyline in, the only other option is bulky space suits or dorky storm trooper armour. Also I guess I could spend more time figuring out exact torso anatomy for all the times that anatomy is leaking out of destroyed clothing.

And the drones are cool for visuals, for sure, but they're only a centimeter or so large, which is like bumblebees? All I'm saying is that the art department design team for turning this into a show would either have to work hard at it or override the very plot points make it wonderful, because it wasn't meant to look like Altered Carbon. Drones should be small. And everyone who could get away with it would wear sweatpants and hoodies everyday.

[notasecunit]

Human genetic diversity is wonderfully abundant in these books, and the cover art in the States that only ever shows Murderbot in EVAC suits or armour leaves us all the joy of seeing whatever future mixed heritage we want to see inside the armor. I've only got a few book-canon character design convictions here:

0) No sex hormones, no gender, no digestive system (lucky bastard.)

1) Murderbot is lanky and mean, since most of it's actual attacks are based on speed and sneakiness. Also there is just too much Terminator baggage with a heavier build.

2.a) Murderbot is basically rocking less than 2cm of hair until ART messes with it.

2.b) Murderbot does not know how to do anything with it's hair other than "grow slightly more of it" until ART introduces it to hair gel this one time. No fancy haircuts, and sounds like hair length maxed out around 10cm, or somewhere short of being a shaggy bigfoot.

3.a) Murderbot doesn’t stand out in crowds. There are only human organics visible above a high shirt collar, though I'd buy in to some non-organic joins showing in its hands.

3.b) Corallary to not giving a crap: it’s not into self decoration, jewelry, or anything beyond “maybe taking a real shower sometimes.” Personal takes: 1.) Anything goes on the eyes; I doubt there’s any meaningfully organic parts beyond some nerve bits. If I need an illustrators crutch for implied cyborgs then I CHOOSE GLOWING EYES. Also I’m gonna need that for drone drawings.

2.) Awkward skin and metal joins on the rest of the body. This is not a cool-looking hybrid. Sadly this means I have to figure that all out since Murderbot spends so much time being damaged. 3.a) On the gender problem: In order to imply toughness or combat ability, many people lean towards imagining heavy builds and hyper masculine traits. In order to imply “not actually male”, there can be a tendency to then lean towards then adding female decorative makeup. In the end, you get “a whole lot of gender” instead of “opting out of all of that”. So I’m keeping this blog for fun and I get to rant: Many artists denote “female” by leaning hard on puffy lips, implied eye-makeup, straight-up makeup, childlike jaws, and either dramatic stick limbs or sweeping curves. Many XX humans don’t actually look like that, so “no sex hormones” is going to look uncomfortably male to a lot of viewers. That’s okay; tall and mildly muscular XX humans with short hair and no makeup also look “uncomfortably male” to United States culture, ask me how I am reminded of that on a daily basis whenever I leave the house. (Every grocery store trip is someone’s educational moment in my boring gendertrolling life since I precipitate pronoun panics in 80% of my interactions with strangers. Worst: I really wish they just, like, wouldn't. "Hey you" would be perfectly functional instead of "SirMa'amSirAreYouA...?") 3b. So to the easy stuff: no sex hormones means no extra estrogen: no developed breasts, no extra fat padding on the hips or arms. No extra testosterone means no dramatic decorative body hair, no extra muscles that aren’t made of robotic cheating, no extra bone development on the jaw or forehead. Easy. Done.

90% of you are going to say I’m drawing a male. Except anyone who has seen Raindove.

...I need to not add the hashtag “character design angst” to every post in the rest of this blog, but ugg, the temptation.

[notasecunit]

My clients are the best clients.

Two sketches of the same scene, which Murderbot doesn’t even realize is a highly planned, coordinated rescue.

The best part of these books is how there are so many badass characters doing all this competent stuff in the background. Murderbot is only good at spoofing networks and punching things; it’s friends are constantly protecting it from things like “lawsuits” or magically producing “money” or “medically stabilizing it when it totally had everything under control”.

(Downside: goddamn all the good scenes require figuring out how to draw at least three characters.)

[notasecunit]

These books have been demanding fanart out of me since forever; this first doodle was from when there were only two novellas.

Network Effect pushed me back to drawing, something I haven’t done for years. This whole tumblr and remembering how to draw thing is happening because souldagger posted this and it cracked me for an hour at 2am and now I can’t stop whatever runaway brain process is creating this blog.

[notasecunit]

nailed it.