hey wanna say i love your legend of sodor art. it's really neat.
also i was wondering what would the monster engines look like when they move their boilers, can you set an example by drawing it please?
Iโve been wanting to figure that sort of thing out for a few years now - enabling some extent of free mobility to a degree but not forgetting that itโs a heavy metal creature. I like to think of it as sort of akin to the articulation of an action figure, but it's weighted in certain areas and there's a limit to how much the joints can bend and swivel until they might screw loose or break off.
The smokebox in a sense is usually the "head piece" that influences the rest of the boiler, which develops an appearance resembling "segmented" pieces as the engine evolves. Snakes and cats were used as references for their body language, in which arcing upward can mean curiosity or aggression, while sitting lower towards the chassis indicates being relaxed, frightened or tired. The running board tends to be divided into sections, so virtually the entire chassis has some semblance of articulation to a fault - although aspects like their funnels, splashers, and cabs (and just about everything below the running board) remain mostly inflexible.
I'm also trying to avoid the route where it's like say, All Engines Go, where the engines are so insanely mobile that they can skew and stretch their body proportions frequently and sometimes even turn their smokeboxes at uncannily sharp angles to look behind themselves (etc). I imagine that there exists locking mechanisms to prevent movement that extreme.
