"Quick Take a Flick" - Digital - 2020
This drawing from February 2020 might be the first real spark of what eventually became King of All the Rust.
I wanted to capture the kind of scene you might come upon while riding a bus through a city on a distant planet, an alternate earth: you look out the window, pull out your recording device, and snap a quick shot of the locals at a food stand while they pose and mug.
So much of KOATR’s design language was already forming here. The homemade android on the left as a sidekick. The facial and body markings. The augmentations. The "alien but familar" vibes. Even the bioluminescent fauna.
A thought remained after I'd moved on from this drawing. After this snapshot, where did these people go? What did their homes look like? What did the streets sound like? What kind of world had produced them?
This was one of the seeds for King of All the Rust.
"At the Ticket Booth with Tuck" - Digital - 2020
The day after drawing “Quick, Take a Flick,” I decided to explore the idea behind the robot sidekick.
The face kept flashing in my head: the grinning cat. Mischievous. Glowing eyes embedded in what could at first be mistaken for its mouth.
“Hey, whatsamatta wid chu!”
Gruff, gravelly, rusting voice.
He’d wear a T-shirt for modesty, but the shirt would be adorned with a vulgar drawing or some slang saying.
“Botsy,” the name came. That’s what these guys were. Homemade creations. Wisecracking, slang-dropping, shit-talking, loyal to a T, and willing to lay down their lives for their creators.
Put together piece by scrap, bartered or traded for, loaded with black-market attitude cards.
There’s a bit of old Bugs Bunny cartoons, the Three Stooges, and a touch of 1970s New York in your typical botsy.
"A Typical Gang on a Typical Day in a Typical Apocalypse" - Digital - 2020
The same week I worked on the drawings above, "Quick take a flick," and "At the ticket booth with Tuck," I finished this one. The design was heavily influenced by the raiders of the Fallout world, one of my favorite games and art concepts. Shout out to the Road Warrior.
The idea behind the drawing was to depict cyborgs who'd once lived in an orderly world but that world had collapsed violently and suddenly.
Like the raiders in the Road Warrior world, everyday people transformed into monsters, so too would the humans who'd undergone cybernetic augmentation become monsters in the world I'd depicted.
The relation to KOATR? the design for these two became the visual guide for what would become the androids post Zero Day.
"A Return to the Excavation" - Digital - 2020
The Excavation of Pompeii - Filippo Palizzi
The relation to KOATR? none. Just the last image I drew the week of February 2020 in which the first seeds of the world of King Of All The Rust were planted.
