The Demolition Bot – Now With Real Napalm!
Not exactly what it says on the tin, but close enough (but that’s not close enough). Here is the Demolition Bot, or Dembot for short. But we could go even shorter than that and call him Screw, which is what he’s actually called and also not what he’s actually called, because I’m in the process of getting it changed to Doomsday. Even that isn’t his real name, as his full title is intended to be Doom ‘Doomsday’ Martinez. Catchy, right?
As the name would suggest, the Dembot deals in explosives – and I mean explosives! The kind that even hiding under a rickety wooden table won’t shield you from, and then some. His weapon of choice is dynamite, and rightly so, from one robot to another, you don’t stand a chance against dynamite. Unless you’re Die-no-mite 3000.
As with every character, I start off with the trusty thumbnailing process. A month or so back, I created a master thumbnail sheet for a wad of different body shapes – you can find the image here – and the team were smitten by ‘O’ and dubbed him as our Demobot from the get-go. I envisioned him to be a petite robot carrying a huge backpack full of explosives and warheads.
From the final versions, the second robot was the most aesthetic, but with the backpack from one. Once this decision was made, I scaled the robot up and took him through to shading and colour.
I’m a sucker for purple and green, and I think in this instance it makes the Dembot look really radioactive, but in terms of complementing the other characters and their colour schemes, it’s a no-go. So we settled on the more diluted teal tones. Now the furnace, that’s a funky idea, the Dembot could ignite his dynamite on his own fire. But it looks like a mouth. And now you can’t unsee that. It drove me crazy when that seed had sewn and I couldn’t see the grill as anything but a mouth, so I quickly (and might I stress roughly) knocked out some alternate face plates for this character. With the mouth gone, he looks cuter and less likely to backchat.
As no one likes to see robo-booty (unless you do like to see robo-booty, in which case, I’m speaking indirectly), it’s time to put some clothes on the little fella, lest he freeze to death, which, for a robot, would just make him more efficient than ever. So, if anything, clothing him is only going to increase the chances of him overheating. Shoot. Looks like we’re going to have to get used to enjoying the sight of robo-booty after all.
If my subtle use of stereotyping wasn’t a dead enough giveaway for you, the Dembot is Mexican, at least that’s what it says in his pants… Which to me said either bandito or mariachi. There’s a certain finesse to the mariachi, which, quite frankly, the Dembot just doesn’t have. He’s crazy and wild, he’ll throw dynamite around like they’re dollar bills at a strip club and then he’ll blow up the place because he was actually just throwing dynamite around. So bandito it is then! Except less poncho, more moustache.
And here he is. 61% crazy, 19% dangerous, 52% scrap metal and 100% terrible at Mathematics. If he runs out of ammo in his barrel the bomb strapped to his chest will go boom. He’s here to blow stuff up and blow stuff up… and he’s all out of blow stuff up.
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Lucy Anna Lowe 