Prototype Class : The Fembot
Meet the fembot, in fact, meet lots of fembots. There can only actually be one fembot, so these gals are going to have to battle it out to the death and the victor will be in our game. Or not. Depending on whether I decide to make more fembots just to grind their gears. And I will make more, oh how I will make. Make more that is. Because I need to. This char is still in production.
During her production, the fembot was actually supposed to be a manbot, unfortunately, the production line exhausted their supply of male personality cores, so old fembot here had to be fitted with a female personality core. Meaning, she has a very butch, macho physique in juxtaposition with a chewing gum walk and a tendency to find small children so adorable she’d want to crush their faces with love.
To start out, I created a reference sheet of physiques and shapes I envisioned the female to have. This means huge, heavy, bulky and and any other synonym of ‘big’. Reference for the first two images and the first on the bottom row are all the works of the marvellous CreatureBox the images include: Inhabitants, RustBucket and Rose and The Boiler. The rad Red Robots Redemption is made by Roberto Roberts, followed by Rosie the Robot by MurderousAutomaton. Finally, the lower row includes Atlas from Portal 2 and Drill Sergeant from Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure.
After this step I began making some silhouettes for the body shape. Though I feel it’s fairly obvious, I used reference from a lot of zombies. And I mean a lot. So many you could class them as a horde and there would still be some left over. Three. 
The team picked 3 and 5 as their favourite body types. And rightly so. From here I sketched out a few thumbnails for robots using the desired body types as a reference. Ugh, these sketches look horrible. Pretend you didn’t see them. Or better still, remove your eyes and reinsert them in 6 to 19 hours when the thought of these concepts are just a distant memory. But that would mean you’ve remembered them. Damn it, you!
So then I just did this. Yeah, that happened. These are three concepts which I didn’t like enough to take further. Two did beg me to carry on. It was kind of endearing really. But not nearly endearing enough. Goodbye two, we had a good run.
For unobvious reasons, we’re going to call this chick Screeny Facey. Admire that penmanship. She doesn’t. She’s very hostile. Probably because of all those times I changed her channel over to BBC2 instead of actually listening to what she had to say (which is never anything of importance or interest).
After unplugging Screeny Facey (she kept chirping on about some fire in my house, I didn’t know what she meant), I got cracking with this little number. Or big number. Number 8 to be precise. She really is brawns over brains, and looks, and also over social etiquette. I put my Copics to the test once more and this time I added an extra touch by whipping out my Prisma-Colour pencil crayons and used the white pencil to add highlights. You can’t even tell I did that.
Goodness! There’s a fire in my house!
After destroying the fire I went back to the thumbnailing process. I love this part. I could do this part forever. Or until I get bored and I just do something else instead. The team like 6, 10 and 18, which is the first time we’ve agreed on anything, ever. I get a bad feeling about this.
For this section I bring up a blank canvas and essentially just lay down shapes until I find a set that I see a character in. I advanced each character through three stages (apart from 7-12 which was a six stage process). This section requires a lot of Free Transform and Horizontal Flip.
This is 6. Say hello 6. “Hello 6!” Oh aren’t you just the wittiest, 6. My shading is improving.
Since this is a female character, she needs to look at least some part feminine. Maybe a corset was too much. Maybe making the corset out of road signs was too little. I don’t know where that balance is.
So instead of using UK road signs, I was told to make it more sci-fi. This is my idea of sci-fi. The colours are nice here, but I worry they’d blend too much with our sandy background. But that didn’t stop be concepting another orange character, no sir.
Robot in a tutu.
Lucy Anna Lowe 