Robot Skeleton Pirate Design Process

The initial design process starts with researching robot character designs and skeletons that I know of and creating a drawing based on that research. I immediately thought of the simplified skeleton robots of Mega Man, both Skull Man and Doc Robot. Warhammer 40K's Necron army of Robot Skeletons was also an inspiration in my design process.  

Next I started doing various shape designs of possible Skull Designs. Luckily, about a year ago I attended a Still Life Drawing Workshop at AFA Gallery in Scranton, PA, where I remember drawing a fake skull that was part of one of the still life's. My memory of this session aided in quickly constructing these skeletons on the page. 

At this point, I was looking more at the Necron Army for body construction of my designs but also utilizing the simple spherical joints from the Mega Mans for the connecting of their robot bodies. I also started gradually adding Pirate attire to my Skeletons. First, adding hat's then researching more and adding some clothing. 

I got to a point in the design where I had a very generic Robot Pirate Skeleton and wanted to create more distinct characters from that mold. I started adding sharper edges on their chins to indicate beards, sharp teeth, missing teeth, and indicating hair. Then I started doing tons of research on Pirate costumes, accessories and weapons.

In the final designs, I didn't want to add too much clothes so I modified some of the parts of the legs and arms so they almost look like they are clothing instead of skeleton arms or legs. I also combined traditional Pirate weapons with Power Tools in some of my designs.

BlackBerry Beard's Mechanical BlueJay Design Process

My focus this past week was to design Captain Blackberry Beard's Mechanical BlueJay that sits on his shoulder. The idea is that Captain Blackberry Beard does not want to be like other pirates and have a parrot on his shoulder. He always wanted a bluejay, even though they don't generally live on the high seas. So, he decided to create a robot blue jay. 

This was a rather difficult assignment that I gave myself. So I started from square one. What makes a blue jay a blue jay? I looked for references of blue jays and proceeded to draw them. I tried to capture as many details as possible. Elements of importance that I noticed were their pointed head shapes and markings on their wings.

After drawing bluejays I then asked myself about the mechanics of a bird's wings. How are they constructed? What do they look like when they are opened and what do they look like when they close. I looked at several anatomy charts of birds wings and how the feathers are in section both on the outside and the inside of the wing. I did tons of drawing studies of wings like this. I managed to post a few on here.

The final part of the process was the most difficult because it required me to take what I learned about bird's wings and blue jays and create a functional robot model of a blue jay. So, I would have to approach all of the bird's organic anatomy as if it was a metal robot.

I began to do a lot of research into robot designs, specifically Capcom's Mega Man series of simple shaped robot designs. Subconsciously, the head design seems to be a combination of Magneto from X-men's helmet along with the pointed fin design of the Rocketeer's helment. His body basically is Mega Man's Xbuster hand shape. I also looked at several metal sculptures of steampunk and mech blue jays. However, most of these designed that I looked at did not have functioning wings. Either the wings were stationary and closed or they only remained opened.

I was baffled at first with how to handle the wings but after a few days, I came up with the idea to make a hinge attached to the Blue Jay's body that attaches to a metal arm. As you can see from this drawing above, there is a half circle shape attached to the metal arm. when the half circle shape extends outward, the arm gets longer and opens the wings.

I also wasn't sure about how to attach the legs because generally, birds legs would come out of the front of the torso. But, my design choice was to have the legs come out of the sides of the bird so that it can turn sideways and morph into a cannon airplane like the image below.