BCGR June Art Progress Report (Patreon)

This month's art goes for the Exemplar Themes pages, and it was the trickiest art to conceptualize so far.

Exemplar Themes are for characters who represent an ideal, often gaining power from it, like GaoGaiGar's Guy Shishio whose G-Stone is powered by courage. These often work best when there's multiple characters in the same group standing for different ideals, like in Digimon Adventure where each character in the main cast has one of eight crests. 

The question is: How do you visually represent this? Show characters as embodiments of heroic ideals like Love and Courage? My first thought was to come up with at least two symbolic logos, like the aforementioned crests, and then perhaps show two characters using them. 

In addition to coming up with at least two symbols, I needed two actions putting those symbols to use.  The two ideas I could think of for the existing Themes in the book were a PC shielding a NPC from bullets with their body for Courage and a robot shooting a heart-shaped beam for Love... But I wasn't convinced.

The Courage action felt kind of generic, it wasn't Mecha-themed enough, and also if I was going to make logos for two of the Themes, I wanted to make logos for all four of the examples in the book. Of course, given that we only had two half pages of space to work with, I couldn't really showcase more than two characters using the logos.

In the end I chose to make four logos for the page with the four examples and to have one character using one of them in the page explaining the general rules. Here's what I did:

You'll notice I went with a hand that glows with an awesome power (directly referencing both G Gundam and making an allusion to GaoGaiGar in the process), instead of a robot shooting a love beam. Making up the logos was difficult enough that I settled for a simpler illustration, instead of coming up with a new robot design just for one picture.

I'm quite proud of the logos themselves. Enough that I decided to rename Reason to Justice just to make a better logo.

Anyhow, with these two pages having art, this brings the list of high priority filler art pages to:

P175: Faction Wealth Tests.

P194: Solar Grid Energy, Religion, Law and Labor.

Which will be finished sometime next month. At that point I will release 1.8.2 and we can either move to the next set of pages or just proceed to getting this ready for printing. I believe we can do the medium priority pages and send this to the printer before the end of the year, if all goes well.

(Rarely do all things go well, but at least we can do everything we can on our end to maximize the odds of success)

Anyway, that's all for now. Version update next month! It's going to be great!

Gimmick Out.