The Mechanic

Hello friends.  I have been a bit inconsistent with my updates, sorry.  So it's been a bit longer than I intended since my last post, but here's some more recent works.  I don't have any animation or 3d bits to post because I have been working on a cartoon project for a friend of mine and that has been taking alot of my time.  Since it isn't my IP, I'm not going to post any progress videos or pics.  When it's done I will see if I can post the video here.

In the meantime:

One of the characters I've cooked up is this mechanic girl, who fixes giant battle robots.  Here's the first picture I did of her.

Anyway, I've posted other pictures of her before, so you probably recognize her.  Well I often draw something random and then dream up and develop a story to go with it after the fact.  I did the same with the Valhalla Girl.  I've been developing the mechanic quite a bit, and you can see some of the evolution of her design as I try and work her into a character that I can animate later.

For all these expression sheets I looked at development pages from animated movies I like.  Alot were from The Road to El Dorado.  They were great reference.  If you wanna see go to http://livlily.blogspot.com. There is artwork from tons of animated movies and shows.  It's a little weird though, because alot of the expressions in those drawings don't fit her character very well.  Most of them aren't faces she wears very often.  I still struggle with consistency.  Having her look the same every time is difficult, but hey, practice makes perfect.

The way her story is growing in my head, is she is the chief of the ground crew for the warbots in an alternate history, slightly steampunky (but not really) ww2 ish time period.  She grew up in a rough part of town, in a family machine shop.  Crime and gangs sort of streets, where she grew into a tough, coarse hardass rather than become dependent on anyone else.  She joined the military rather than get sucked into gang life because they are small fry in comparison.  Spent some time in the trenches before her smarts stood out and her officers figured she would be more valuable fixing the big guns rather than carrying a small one. She isn't very big, which made her grow more fearsome to be able to hold her ground in two different aggressive environments.  It also made her develop her smarts and skills to get ahead.  So her bigger or older crew members have no problem with being the boss because she's the smartest one in the hangar.  No one knows the warbots like she does.