A Book of Drawings by Ian McQue

I’ve featured Ian McQue‘s work before on here, his glorious colour work mostly, and now he’s produced an A4-sized book of B&W sketchbook drawings subtitled ‘Robot, Space Dudes, Flying Ships etc’.

His work is populated by flying barge-type ships, usually moored to buildings or futuristic dockyards, small insect-like craft and boxy rough-terrain vehicles. His human characters come in all shapes and sizes and his robots are of the thin, lanky variety or sometimes like spider mechs.

There are even a few deviations in the book to more fantasy countryside scenes, a page of Hellboy studies and a certain Judge costume that features here a fair bit.

The book – and several colour prints – are available from his bigcartel shop and some come with a personal sketch in the front.

Posted in Art, Books, Robots. | 4 Comments |

New version of Keloid short by BLR_VFX

Those of you with a good memory might recall that I posted a short film nearly 2 years ago called ‘Keloid’ by the BLR_VFX studio – some of whom worked on District 9 and Elysium. BLR stands for Big Lazy Robot – check the out here. In the last 3 days they’ve updated it and all I can say is ‘wow!’ No one does mecha better, make a full length feature like this and I’m there.

Posted in Film, Robots. | No Comments |

Ian McQue

I’ve been following Scottish concept artist Ian McQue on Twitter for some time now (he’s English you know, he just lives in Scotland). He has a thing for flying tug boats, future tech and the odd robot now and then.

He posts the most incredible images and calls them ‘doodles’, ‘sketches’ or ‘speed-paints’. It’s good that people with this much talent are also humble. Check out more of his work on CGHub or his blogspot (but he posts a lot more on Twitter).

Posted in Art, Design, Robots. | 1 Comment |

Dragon’s Heaven by Makoto Kobayashi

I hadn’t seen this before: Japanese Manga artist Makoto Kobayashi‘s ‘Dragon’s Heaven’ was an animated short made in 1988 featuring a lot of his weirder mech designs and drawn in a style more reminiscent of Moebius than the more polished styles you’d see in the Gundam cartoons.

Kobayashi’s mecha are unique, spindly, organic, curvacious and look like they could fall over any minute. It’s sometimes hard to tell where the eyes are or even which way round the body should face as his angular designs defy all regular robotic logic. This is the only time I’ve seen an animated short with this kind of look. The film starts with a face off between two actual models before moving into animation but the credits turn into a mini making-of feature involving the models from the intro.

You can see the whole thing on YouTube but it’s split into several parts.

Posted in Film, Robots. | 1 Comment |

1/12th scale Ma.K. Krote upcoming from 3A

I know, what the hell does that even mean?

Ma.K (aka Maschinen Krueger or SF3D) = Vintage line of Japanese toys by Kow Yokoyama and was one of (if not THE) originators of the weathered, realistic looking mechs and vehicles.

3A = Ashley Wood and Kim Fung Wong‘s toy company who have taken inspiration from Kow amongst others and raised the level of toy making higher than most in recent years.

Don’t ask when these will be available or how much they will cost because I don’t know, you just have to keep an eye on the 3A blog or sign up to their newsletter.