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.
Second up in the SBBR designs, the KMB Custom Three Cheers! was immensely fun to work through and I would site as being formative in my approach to my mech commissions going forward. It might be my favourite of the set and I'm particularly happy with the torso.
Ali's brief for the Three Cheers! was probably the the most in depth/involved one, so let's just go over some of that: I was to take the sihouette of the Arbalest and the F91 as inspiration, and then apply to it the design language of the Brutishdog from VOTOMS, in addition to the Adamant Arms design language and the Three Cheers! custom quirks.
My initial sketches were pretty close to what would be the final product, but my work on the waist skirt was a little bit too Gundam-like and we wanted to tie it back to the Troop. As the Ad-Arms base design, it would be likely Broun would have used parts for their Custom unit, so I altered the torso and waist skirt to incorporate pieces directly canniballized from my Troop design.
Compositionally, I wanted to evoke the Three Cheers! in action during SBBR's second mission, in the Memoria Teardrop by Lake Timea. I was initally really excited about showing the mech deploying flashbang payloads and using really stark lighting. We ended up pushing away from that direction. You can also see in these my first looks at the Adamant Arms & Artiface design award we wanted to put on the front of the card. That first one you see was me nodding to Independence, but we ended up going a different direction. You can see my sketches for the awards, as well, below.
As a final note, around this time I had bought myself an Arbalest kit along with a couple of other Gunpla. While I was building it I became kind of obsessed with the idea that I could make a kitbashed together Three Cheers! with the Arbalest as a base. I added a 30mm tank and some leftover pieces from some IBO kits I had lying around to make this, which I'm pretty happy with, as a final kitbash. The weird wrench thing even reverses the way its supposed to.
The last card in the SBBR set was Valence's Hippocampus, a fun challenge, being a non-combat-oriented mech. It was painted really late in the season which may be ironic and/or hard-hitting for those in the know. Let me counterbalance that with this, the ad-arm designation Loveliness (which always comes from an animal's collective noun) comes from the collective noun for a group of ladybugs.
Dre had early on pointed out a couple of designs as inspiration including things like magitek armour. I then set about applying the Adamant Arms & Artiface design language to that, which I generally define as more blocky and utilitarian, with a lot of exposed pistons. You'll see that language in all of my mechs in this series other than Mow, who is a Zenith model, the Ad-Arm competitor.
Here are my initial designs, exploring different takes on the unfoldable rotors and comms arrays. I took inspiration from Death Stranding's Odradrek which made it into the final design. I imagine it would open and close rapidly in the same manner.
As per Dre's request, the cockpit/body was lowered and push back to be more between the legs. To accommodate this, I pulled the rotors towards the back of the mech.
Another challenge was composing an action shot for a comms mech. Again, I drew from the Lake Timea stuff and in the end we picked the one we felt was the least aggro. I still like the weird signal lines of A and D but am happy with where we ended up. I had just rewatched Porco Rosso at the time and was eager to play with the propeller blur and wind effects that you see in the final.
Here are the colour mock-ups I did. I don't think I really had a great idea of the way we should go with these, at the time, so I was very glad to get feedback from Dre that I think was a really excellent way of thinking about it and the direction we went, so I'll just directly quote them: "Valence wouldn’t care about paint job. I like that first one because it looks old and standard"
A couple more small things to note here are that I inserted a dumb joke into the decal for this piece: the LN-54-0 is "Loveliness" followed by the chemical number and valence of Xenon, one of the noble gasses. The other thing to note is that at the time I started working on the piece I came across a tweet from Peter Wartman, an incredible hard surface artist and character designer, about this jet undercarriage. It influenced a lot of how I approached the Hippocampus' body.
And that's it for the cards I did solo. Once again, a huge shout-out to the Friends at the Table team, who were a joy to work with, for trusting me with their mechs and giving me really good feedback, and to Conner Fawcett who is so good at what they do that it constantly pushed me to be better. Thanks for reading!
