Back towards the beginning of 2020 I got to do half of the 9 postcards for the Patreon of my very favourite podcast, Friends at the Table, for their 6th season, PARTIZAN alongside Conner Fawcett. Conner has already done a thread of their work on the postcards, which is incredible and you should check it out.
While Conner's work was designed to look like in-world photographs, snapped of player characters' mechs, mine were designed to look like a set of in-universe trading cards. This let Conner's more grounded work take on the grounded subjects and let my dynamic posing and more "heroic"-looking mechs be just that.
To set the tone of the series, we started with the card for the Troop, PZN's cannon fodder grunt suit, which was heavily based off both the Shadowhawk from Battletech and the painting 17IX by Jakob Rozalski. The important detail about both of these is that while the shouldermounted gun can point up or down, it must point the direction the robot is facing. This robot cannot look at you without pointing a gun.
Here are the colour explorations I did during the process. You can see us actively shy away from some of the first set's replication of Gundam series grunt suit colours and push more towards something that we felt was more emblematic of something that idolized the Principality.
The card stats are based off of the Beam Saber mech skills, but combined the skills "Battle" and "Bombard" into the sort of silly "Battlevolley". One of the things Austin wanted to pull from was a set of collectible Transformers cards and in our explorations we encountered this, on the wiki:
We imagined that bitter, shitty nerds would argue on forums about how the cards were better when Battle and Bombard were separate or something to that effect. Battle used to mean something.
Zenith A Project Prototype Eudaimonia AKA Mow was the first of the SBBR mechs I got to design. We wanted to gesture at the content of Obelle, On Fire. One of our big challenges with these cards was to establish scale w/o needing many other details present. You'll notice all my designs for this series look up at the mech and that's very intentional as a means of establishing scale. Here, the hay bales are doing the lifting for establishing that. I hope Mow big enough for y'all.
We weren't sure if Thisbe was going to be visible in the card and decided against it. As the one setting the precedent for the series, having the pilot visible would potentially lead folks to believe that the pilots would be visible in every card, but I do have this from my initial linework.
Colour exploration took quite a while on this one. The first round of ideas wasn't really doing it, and it led to me doing another 7 colour schemes before we landed on the one we went with, which I'm pretty happy with. I think actual Mow would be more faded and worn than this, but these are propaganda pieces: the mech will look clean.
