Dark Dweller
Depth dwellers unite, and swan dive in the Dark, Metal Masked Machines designed to always hit their mark.
obviously all of the cool energy tatoos carved onto the robots are so that they can be lights amidst an infinite expanse of darkness, duh. they were Made this way.
About the piece - I'm still feeling inspired by anglerfish and other deep sea creatures, I spent more time than usual adjusting the texture on this one to give the dark blue a sinking feeling, but it being this dark also means the turquoise can stand out more which I like. I didn't get the detail as intricate as I would like, but its cool that this feels like more of a full body piece than I usually do, theres a bit more posture here.
One aspect of my setting I want to get better at depicting is there being "Celestial, Skybound" robots, and "Terrestrial, Groudbound" robots - they are sisters, at once the same, and yet parallel. Sometimes I like to think of variants, like what would the Celestial variant of this Terrestrial one look like or vice-versa, and that leads to some of the more exciting designs to try.
The Celestial ones live in and explore space - their part of the Singular Empire probably looks like thousands of space stations. The Terrestrial ones live on the ground so they have more complex structures and cities, but the "ground" also has unexplored frontiers, locales and wildernesses that require specialised equipment.
I like the idea that the robots can be natural astronauts of sorts, they're robots so maybe they don't need to breathe, but maybe they might still need tools to travel and move around or interact with their environment. Recently in the limited spare time from work I've been thinking about what their tools and equipment could look like, given that setting lets me have all kinds of different explorers.
This ones "wings" are probably meant to be one such kind of equipment - maybe it's like a jetpack - the idea is in the setting that the machining (lol) and craftspersonship of tools have gotten so refined that the cyborgs can get equipment that looks "like themselves" from a competent enough smith, even if they have really ornate or unusual patterns or shapes. Maybe amusingly when theyre using something generic second hand it very obviously doesn't look "like themselves".
In the past I've drawn others with similar backpacks that have gatling guns or other equipment instead, like the wings are a storage platform or something (while still maintaining the silhouette of being wings). I've somehow lost confidence in giving them complex looking equipment in the years since then, and should find a way to get it back.