Robot 44

I have some more visual development stuff for Missile Mouse: Rescue on Tankium3
. One of the main characters in this book is the Galactic Security Bot Robot 44. He's a loyal partner to Missile Mouse and proves to be just as tenacious as the rodent himself.

I began sketching out designs for him on my story writing pages. At this early stage I new I wanted a big black dome for the head because I thought it looked cool.

The idea developed further as I played around with proportions and little details like the joints. My editor felt like this design looked more like a guy in a spacesuit than it did a robot and you know what he was dead right. Plus he said there's no way for anyone to relate to this character if you can't see any sort of face. Right again. Sometimes I get too hung up on a design and I forget the practicality of it.

So I went back into the design trying to go for a more clunky robot look, and began working out an appealing robot face.

Didn't like the above sketches all that much, but these guys below started to get close to something I liked.

As it came closer and closer to actual production time on the book I had to go with something, but I didn't think this guy was quite there yet. Then it dawned on me to stick the dome head on the new body design and give him a glowing digital face projection, not unlike Eve from Wall-E.

Here's the data sheet and cutaway I did for the World of Missile Mouse section in the back of the book:

And finally, here's Robot 44 in action:

The Tankians

In Missile Mouse: Rescue On Tankium3 there's a race of amphibian men who have become enslaved and it's up to Missile Mouse to rescue them. The tankians went through a couple design passes before I settled on something. In this first page I initially thought of my main character, Lasukus, as being a little boy:

But the story changed and I knew he needed to be older. Plus I knew I needed to draw A LOT of these guys in the end of the book, so the design couldn't have too much line mileage. Here's the direction it went next:

And here's the final design on an information page I made for the Tankian race for the "Guide to the Missile Mouse Universe" I have at the end of the book:

And lastly, the guys in action. They're actually good guys, but they've all been outfitted with mind control devices that forces them to be agents for the evil King Bognarsh (more on him later):

Lava Monster

Here's some concept sketches I did for the lava monster in Missile Mouse: Rescue On Tankium3. When I'm writing out the story I'll often times sketch out designs on the same page. You can see here I was initially thinking he could be some sort of armored worm. Eventually he evolved into an armored insect/crustacean thing.

I compiled a few sketch pages into one below to show the progression of the design. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted after the first couple sketches so a lot of these are roughly in the same ball park. I did lose the idea of him rolling up in a ball, though I still really like that idea.

And here's four pages from the book where we see this guy in action.