Justin Gerard

"Bloorguhl has uhhpgrades, if yoou have coooin..."

Added 2024-01-26 19:29:22 +0000 UTC

Today I have a fun little trader from the Martian of the Month series to share with you. These would be the characters you would encounter in game that might upgrade your gear, sell you illegal plasma canons, or scam you out of all your credits.

There are about 12 of these planned, but this was the one I was looking forward to the most. It's been a while since I had a chance to do a finished illustration from the Martian series, and it was a lot of fun to go in and detail the broken down robots and wacky sci-fi tools. Most of my work ends up being very medieval fantasy, so this was a nice, albeit challenging, break.

The painting process for this one wasn't terribly new and longtime subscribers will be very familiar with the steps involved. I started with a pair of little thumbnails (above) which were light on detail, but captured a lot of the personality and narrative elements that I was after. Obviously, the eye on the squid provides the central focal point for the image and from there everything else just sort develops. Initially he was much dirtier, and had an old lunch sitting in an open hatch on his head, and there was trash just everywhere. But some of this filth felt like a shortcut and was obscuring some of the hard work of making the mechanical stuff look believable.

(Rough color comp above)

Mechanical stuff has always been more challenging to draw freehand for me, so I forced myself to really declutter those areas and really try and figure out how the geometry would work. (Never take the easy way out!)