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mrgilder In reply to Stnk13 [2013-01-14 14:01:43 +0000 UTC]

That's a tough, sort of multi-faceted question to answer. I have a love of armor, or the concept of armor in general, from a historical perspective. But for the most part, when I draw power-armor suits like this, I'm pulling from the tremendous soup in my head of all the old anime that I grew up watching, and some video games, and shows like Power Rangers, etc. As far as armors go (as opposed to my giant robot stuff) I'm mainly inspired by two Japanese cartoons that I grew up watching:

Guyver (which also has a sweet, cheesey live-action version):

[link]

And Samurai Troopers (which was called Ronin Warriers in the West):

[link]

This particular suit was also inspired by traditional Chinese armor. The type that you might see in the Dynasty Warriors video game series:

[link]

Stylistically I try to take some of the design ideas of those anime images and meld them with a starker, more detailed Western comic-book sensibility.

From a perspective of design, what I like most about drawing suits of armor or robots, is that they're designed by you to fulfill a specific purpose. So an armor like this starts from a more nebulous concept like the types of motions that I imagine it performing in combat. This suit was sketched up for an idea for a comic that I had that I called "Bioshredder" wherein dudes in high-tech armor would go nuts against hordes of zombies. So the exaggerated forearm blades came from the need to slice through multiple assailants with one stroke. I also generally imagined what sort of armor that I would have to design in order of facilitate the movement of one holding their first out in front of them, arms straight, and just running through a crowd of enemies. How could I turn that act deadly? The forearm blades came from that idea.

I hope that all of this makes sense.

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Stnk13 In reply to mrgilder [2013-01-14 22:30:55 +0000 UTC]

Thanks man this was very informative. Do you have any cons coming up you are going to?

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mrgilder In reply to Stnk13 [2013-01-16 14:23:44 +0000 UTC]

I'm glad that my armor rambling made sense to you.

As far as upcoming cons goes, I have no idea what's going on. I don't think that the store I work for is very gung-ho about going to any right now. They're definitely not organized. In October they straight up didn't book a table at a con that we had planned on attending since the summer, then didn't tell me until the day before that I wasn't working it. I was not pleased. I did one day at a board game con in mid November, and there they told me that things were going on Winter hiatus until probably about February. I haven't had contact with anybody since then. Who knows what's going on.

If things go according to plan with my current art project:

[link]

then I'll be looking into attending cons to sell my paintings on my own behalf. But I'm producing pieces so slowly with work and everything that it'll be a long time before that happens.

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Stnk13 In reply to mrgilder [2013-01-16 22:45:24 +0000 UTC]

Check out the Too Many Games video game show in June in King Of Prussia. Your 8bit paintings would probably sell there. [link]

I did it last year and am doing it with my friend Chuck. We had a blast there.

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mrgilder In reply to Stnk13 [2013-01-17 14:49:50 +0000 UTC]

Yeah. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be going there for the store regardless. Alot of people have told me that there's a pretty solid board-game fanbase there too that our stock would do well with. I'm gonna keep pushing my bosses to have a presence there.

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