#fractalsilver

[the-hydroxian-artblog]

Any tips or guides on how you draw such wonderful mechanical/toy-like characters? It feels robust but not overwhelming, love it.

Thank you! So a lot of it is just knowing how to slap the joints on a normal humanoid body. If you research stuff like figma action figures and real life robots, you'll quickly build up a mental library of mechanical joints that correspond to different body parts. Many things that apply to robots apply to toys and things, though it always depends.

Once you have this library built up, you can kinda just do Whatever. Answered a similar ask a long while back that goes into more detail as well.

Some robots are much more detailed than this though, and the main inspirations I have for Normal Robots in particular are from Portal 2, particularly in Atlas and P-Body; the trick they use is having all the mechanical bits (usually pistons) being colored black and dark-grays, with the shells and casings being white or some other contrasting color.

This is an excellent way of having your cake and getting to eat it as well, because the colored casing draws your eye, and you get rewarded with taking in all the finer mechanical bits without getting distracted by them first.

This main principle is what I use for Kaita, who has mechanical parts, but often shows more subtly in her neck and torso/abdomen.

If you just quickly glanced at this closeup of Kaita from this older bit of art I did here, you'd probably not completely realize she's a robot, but seeing the strange geometric shapes etched into those areas might clue you in. To reiterate: while robots like Kaita are more complicated than toys, they share a good deal of mechanisms for stuff like rotating the arms, turning wrists, etc.

It's also just kinda a character design thing in general, is using strong shape language and going for something... toyetic. Which sounds redundant, but you'd quickly understand what I mean when you look at something like, say, Fortnite characters, or the designs to Ben10 aliens. They're not toys, but they all kinda have that Look to em, and they look like that not just because they do in fact have merchandise, but because that kinda blocky look is really readable, and excellent for action scenes and poses. Just that blocky shape language and strong color-schemes can do a lot of heavy lifting on even the simplest designs.

My main inspirations are Sonic and TF2, which I feel is weirdly obvious when you look at someone like Victor if you look at the blockiness of his body and the way I stick to a limited color palette. As-is he wouldn't fit in either universe visually, but you can kinda see how the design principles bleed into how he looks now.

[byelacey]

Lys as a Warlock is an interesting choice: Could also see him as Demon Hunter since they have demon souls bound to theirs etc. (And still get all the shadow and fel stuff too.)

i don’t know much about demon hunters, but it feels a little *too* edgy for lys, whereas a blood elf warlock can just be a little magic-addicted guy dabbling with demons. he probably has petty little fights with his imp