Developing the Robo Samurai character...

 After a short Easter break and my best friend's funeral I'm back on the case and have decided to develop my Robo Samurai character designs. The last big decision I made with regards to this character was that it would have a motorcycle wheel instead of legs, this idea just occurred to me while walking my dogs so thought I'd roll with it! :D 

Now I had a very loose idea of the way the character was going to move I wanted to get a better idea of the overall shape of the body and play around with the shape language. I initially wanted to use lots of diagonals, triangles and sharp edges to make it look as dynamic and dangerous as possible but was also open to other shapes as well. So I started sketching very quick, loose thumbnail designs experimenting with different shapes. Below is the first sheet...

You can see how the ideas progressed moving from top left to right, the bottom three are slightly more developed but still very simplistic, even though I'm now using different shapes for the armour and clothing and changing the style of helmet. During this process I'm trying to communicate as much as possible using the least amount of lines as I can. I liked the thumbnail in the middle on the bottom row but wanted to continue iterating before choosing one to develop. 

In this second batch (above) again I started with a very simplistic thumbnail sketch (top left) and then systematically changed the head gear, shoulder pads and main body shape. I liked two designs on this page, the top middle and the bottom right, I may go on to develop a couple of the thumbnails from this page and the last but on this occasion I made the decision to go with the one top middle as I liked the balanced pose and overall shape.

I then took this onto a new sheet and redrew it a couple of times trying to work up the initial sketch...

Here I added a bit more detail to the armour, trying to make the upper body look metal and the shoulder pads and armour either side of the waist look more like traditional Samurai gear. I soon found that as a whole there was too much information that needed to be considered and it would be best if I broke the design down into sections and worked on them separately. So I started with the upper body, before I move on to the helmet, face, arms and then to the lower half of the suspension and wheel.

So as mentioned in the last paragraph, above I started with the body from the last page which is more oval/egg shaped. On the chest I like the idea of having an energy source that can be seen and described visually as a light or glow. Moving to the right I then added horizontal lines to the chest and altered the design of the pelvis to incorporate a section that will connect to the axle and wheel parts as well as making the design look more streamlined in my opinion. Still playing around I changed the shape of the chest and angle of the pelvis then drew it in profile. This was a little too upright for me and I wanted to make the design a bit more pointy and extreme.

At this stage the plan was to design the chest first and then the shoulder pads and connect them afterwards but I wondered what it would look like to add shoulders (shown middle left) but I felt this looked too much like a manikin so this led to the design bottom left where the shoulder pads and the chest are part of the same unit. I liked this shape so decided to develop it in the page below...

Here I took the shape above and started by drawing it from different angles, from the front the shoulder pads looked spiky at the edges but when viewed from three-quarter or side view they actually curve around. I wasn't completely sure how to have them connect at the back, I wanted to try and have a shoulder blade shape in there. This was developed later, for now I continued pushing the design. I wanted it to protrude forwards more but when I drew the design middle left, I felt it was becoming a bit too feminine in shape so added a ridge to the chest and adjusted the shape again.

At this point I thought I was going to make the character's outer body smooth and shiny, however i started looking at my research into Samurai armour and decided I wanted to add more of a texture...

So after looking at the pictures above I went on to develop the upper body of my design and create the drawings below...

Above are views from the front, back, three-quarter and side. This isn't the most complicated of designs but I wanted to try and strike a balance between designing a robot and obviously a traditional looking Samurai and I'm very pleased with the design so far.

Also baring in mind, I still have to add the arms, head etc

Next I'll be designing the helmet and face.