Year 3 Style Matrix Part 1

A new year a new project, this time with more freedom and choice. So naturally of course I want to ease myself into this year and focus on what I really want to do and that's concept art. Of course I dont mean solely focusing on just 2D, something I learnt (after a brutal critique at Industry workshops 2016) was that there's different solutions to different problems, theres no one method for creating good art. So 3D will be a help this year, especially for more environment based pieces. But for the first Style Matrix brief Im going for something I bit more vanilla, something I can have some fun with and be creative with. So I went with off-world laborer character brief, I'm familiar with it I know it wont kill me and I can toy with it a bit. At first I drew what one would normally think about when you say off world laborer - "Hazmat suit in space".

Of course as normal going through motions doing some research for the first few days, then thumbnails then a quick initial painting and I knew I could go a little bit further push something more interesting. So looking at some old sci-fi films one caught my eye and that was an old Disney animated film : Treasure Planet. So in treasure planet its essentially Treasure island with long John Silver in Space.

So considering a blend of the time period with futuristic concepts and ideas like space travel and wormholes and lasers etc. I thought it would be really friggin awesome to design some Space laborers for that kind of setting. Mind you not exactly the universe and artistic style of Treasure Planet but same kind of aesthetic and concept.

So I fiddled around with some research and thought it'd be cool to design a mining suit for mining asteroids or deep hazardous mining caverns or something like that, so I looked at some late medieval plate armors, moplin shirts, old diving helmets and lots and lots of padding which resulted in the above quick sketch, just to get a look and feel for what I wanted. and I went and designed some more:

Using a lasso tool to work out some thumbnails and then just some simple line art for some initial concepts I worked through changing up what someone who'd be mining asteroids would wear, considering the heat, or climate they might be in, whether it might be in a vacuum or not, possibly adding some high vis elements? What would sell the design is obviously the tool so I went for a pickaxe like tool to say "This mean is a Miner clearly".

So I went with one of the later design choices, combining some elements of all of them, like the skirt which I imagined would help if the miner was using more complex tools like a jetback or something with an exhaust and the skirt would protect the miner from the exhaust heat. I chose to change the hat as it stood out a little better than the helmet for this kind of character, and I'll probably use the helmet on a different character in this series. Putting a torch on the pick to provide better light and of course a headlamp to provide even more light. Its a really fun brief once you start getting some momentum with the idea. The hardest part of the brief however is coming up with interesting professions for all the laborers of which there needs to be six. So right now I've settled on: Miner, Porter (someone who carries things), Engineer, Foreman (Going off of Dune logic with people serving as calculators and computers) but still trying to think of some more. I've been tossing around with idea of some kind of Interstellar Translator who might need to use various objects to translate alien languages (like some kind of worm in his ear or something), Lumberjacks for space trees, Construction Workers (which would look similar to the engineer so), Fisherman, Janitor, Gardener etc.

Some thumbnails for the Porter and Mechanic respectively. For the porter I was thinking of some kind of genetically altered clone/slave thing, something big and strong and kinda scary. I'm going off of a colonial aesthetic and universe - just in space- so trying to envision what a slave might look like to a hyper-advanced but at the same time archaic society.