Nikolai Meets the Robots

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I intend to explore some of my comic characters as series of images rather than narratives. I don’t have the time to explore four or five different properties as stories, so I’ll be satisfied with developing them as art pieces.

A character mentioned and shown previously was Robothead Nikolai Sodorov. He’s a down-on-his-luck, Russian-speaking miner with an extremely sunny disposition in an America of the future. Across the city, in the high rent district, a professor unwittingly lets loose an army of sentient, but angry, robots.

Nikolai is injured in a battle with the robots and the professor saves Nikolai by grafting one of the robots to the top of Nikolai’s head. Nikolai feels grateful to the Professor and vows to clean up the city, ridding it of the robot menace meeting scads of adventurers and mercenaries tasked with the same endeavor in the process.

I think these can make for some interesting prints (more to come on that later today, I hope). They’re a lot of fun to draw and sort of act as a plot outline for a greater narrative that I can revisit at a later date. Fun!

Here’s the final image for the latest piece, titled the same as this blog post:

And some process:

At this point, I hadn’t finalized a model sheet for Nikolai and his facial features are in flux. Still, the composition is good and I can continue refining the details and nailing down colors.

After the above color test, I proceeded with inks, and resolved how to draw a wide-eyed Nikolai. In all my previous attempts, Nikolai had his eyes cheerily clamped shut. That’s his default state, more or less. Making him appear surprised by eyebrow machinations alone proved pretty impossible, so I strayed a bit and let him have two black marbles rattling around above his cheekbones.