Love Triangulation: Debriefing 2 (Patreon)

Part 2 (of 5) in a series of design debriefings on Love Triangulation for Smut Peddler Sex Machine.

Page 3

For Morelos, our protagonist, Blue gave me the following description:

MORELOS: A younger man in his 20s, fit but with a slighter build, dark hair in a topknot. Both of his arms and legs are prosthetic, cut off at the shoulders and above the knees, respectively. For clothing he has a one- piece, snug-fitting space-age jumpsuit that opens down the middle - something that’s meant to be worn for multi-day journeys in a vehicle.

I've drawn a few SF comics worlds where the characters wear one piece bodysuits, so with this design I wanted to break that up a little with the sewn-in shorts section and the appearance of multiple types of fabric making up the jumpsuit. I also wanted to keep the robotic limbs unclothed.

I was also trying to work in some Adidas-esque stripes onto his legs and shoe-feet to tap into that element of the contemporary British aesthetic, but then I designed almost every single panel in such a way that would obscure the outside of his legs.

As for the shoe-feet, I wanted to have my cake and eat it too regarding the sneaker silhouette and toe flexibility (which comes up in later pages).

These were some of the earliest character pencils I did for the entire story, and you can really tell I was still trying to figure out how to move the sideknot around on the character's head. But I otherwise liked the hand-over-mouth face, and it became the prototype I referred back to a lot when drawing later faces.

Around here, the script called for a character named Seever, a technician who would show up for only three pages. But there were no character description. An oasis of freedom when drawing someone else's script!

I had also drawn her with allen key style ratcheting fingertips but sadly I never got a chance to draw her hands close up in the comic.

And finally we have good old Gam, here. He's kind of the secondary protagonist for the rest of the story.

GAM: A spider-like exoplanetary vehicle the size of a car. Saffron yellow. Has a porthole for entering an exiting the cockpit on the top of its chassis, and an orb with a camera lens set into the front of the chassis that serves as an “eye.” Has six legs and two smaller “fine motor appendages” on the outside. Cockpit is rounded, has a seat and a wraparound viewscreen on the inside. Cables are everywhere. Your basic frames of reference are the Tachikomas from the Ghost in the Shell comics and shows, but you can get a little more Moebius with them, too.

Looking back at this description now, it seems like I discarded a lot of this too (sorry again, Blue!).

I've never been particularly comfortable (or interested in, to be honest) drawing vehicles. My ships and such are always a lot less designed than they could be, and when I have to draw a car or a motorcycle or something of that ilk my interest tends to drop to around zero percent. I thought this would be a good chance to push back against that sort of artistic laziness.

I started looking at a lot of multilegged creatures to see the various ways that evolution has solved the design problems I was beginning to tackle. When designing the exterior of Gam's body, it largely came down to building an interesting silhouette that conveyed both weight and the potential for explosive motion--which would be key to the action scene later in the comic.

Keeping track of just how many leg segments there were, how they folded, and what angles they'd rest at kept me quite busy. I tended to number sections 1 2 3 4 as I drew them just to keep them straight.

After designing the shape of the machine while walking, I realized that in the  first drawings you'd see him in, he's supposed to be waiting, resting on his haunches. With that in mind, I went back and changed some proportions of leg segments to make it more natural for him to rest somewhat symmetrically and flatly. It made for a more aesthetically pleasing human machine style image. One that we could break later as it sprung to life and walked and emoted.

Another key concern was scale! But we'll get into that next week!

(Edit: through a personal error, this was originally set to public instead of $5+, so I'll switch it to Patrons Only since it emailed it out to everybody.)