Hey y’all, my name is Tristan; some of you may know me as Finchfish[linktr.ee]. I’m one of the artists working at VGI – specifically, I design characters and other art assets that need doing for our games. Before coming onto the team, I was mainly doing freelance editorial illustration for a few magazines. When Covid shut down all the magazines I was previously working on, I was recommended by a friend to Vertigo Gaming Inc. and officially started at the end of 2020. My first assignment was making the art assets for ChefSquad! Today I’m going to be giving a little behind the scenes look at how I designed some of the robot customers in Cook Serve Forever.

So how do we go…

Art Direction Brief

The first step of any type of creative endeavor is to know what the heck you’re making. I received the concept brief of these characters from our Creative Lead David and my Art Director Lizzy. The idea is to make robot characters set in a Solarpunk/Tech future city named Helianthus. The city will include different rings – the outer ring has a more run-down solarpunk aesthetic while the inner ring is more tech-based and wealthy. These robots will be designed to look like they are from specific rings of the city. We also want the robots to be food delivery robots who look like they could live in the same universe as Cook Serve Delicious 3’s Whisk and Cleaver.

Research and Development

Now that I know what to draw, I move on to step two. For this step, I do the same thing I do with every big assignment – I make a Pinterest board. I like to use keywords from the brief such as solarpunk, robot, and futuristic tech to search for and compile images that will inspire my designs. This is such an important step, maybe the most important, of the process because you are building the foundation of everything that comes after. It’s also the step that usually takes the longest and the step that I never really complete until the very end of the piece.

A common misconception about artists is that they just make art. They know how to draw something, and they just do it. However, artists aren’t just artists; they are also researchers. Depending on the piece, we might have to study history, math (ugh), biology, etc., to create believable art. In this case, I research things such as, what defines the solarpunk aesthetic, future technology, what a worn-down robot might look like, and how rust forms. Because, as much as I’d like to say, I've seen The Iron Giant enough times to draw a robot character, the fact is I haven’t. I have to go out of my comfort zone and draw something I don’t think I ever draw – mech.


Concept Sketches

After I’ve compiled all the references I need to get started, I begin digital sketching. We split the work into groups of five robots at a time. For the first group we had time to come up with names before any real concepts. These were names of the companies these robots were made by: Hare, Bolt, Carrier, Winged and Lickety Split.

This group will be a “neutral group” whose designs will work in either ring of the city. The nice part about making different versions of one concept is you can pick aspects of designs to blend together. For example, we liked the overall shape and style of the Carrier’s fourth version, but we added the pigeon-like elements and hair of version one to it so the name made more sense. After we settled on the first group, I sketched a bunch of other ideas I had, some that were leftover from the original group that I liked, such as the bat concept. I gave each bot a ring of the city I think they belonged in, solarpunk or tech.

Character design is one of my favorite things to do art-wise, so this was my favorite part, and even if a design isn’t picked, it’s an idea that I have in my back pocket if I want to use it for something else.


Feedback and Rounds of Review

When I’m happy with the concepts I have, I send them over to David and Lizzy for review. We decide on the characters we want, and I do any small design changes to finalize our new delivery robots! Now we have to think about colors. I draw each robot in a T-pose position, duplicate the lines, and come up with some palettes.

One of my favorite designs was the bee design (seen above.) I decided to call this one Royal Jelly, because that’s what baby bees eat, and if that ain’t the cutest thing. I’m a huge animal and nature nerd, so whenever I can incorporate those elements into a character design, I’m living the dream. Some of the color combinations were actually based on real animals, such as Blue Carpenter Bees, Honduran White Bats and Koi Fish to name a few. The color combo options are once again sent for review, and now we have to pose and render them!


Art Style and Final Work

Creative people are notoriously bad at taking compliments and being too hard on themselves about their art. I’ve struggled with accepting that my style of art is not as recognizable as bigger artists I admire with unique styles. That’s because I tend to illustrate in many different styles, and if you are an artist and also have a varied style, I’m here to tell you that that is ok! In fact, sometimes it can be extremely helpful. In the case of these character designs, I was tasked to make them a similar style to Lizzy’s designs of Whisk and Cleaver and also the human characters that had already been created for the game at that point, Nori and Chef Rhubarb. This means I needed to study Lizzy’s art and dissect it in a way, to figure out which techniques I need to use for the final look of my robots.

The hardest part of this last step is making the first robot. After I’ve figured out the style and process of how to get from sketch to final product, I just repeat those steps for each robot. That first robot acts almost as an instruction book for the rest.

1. I started with a sketch as I do with any rendering.
2. The lineart was drawn and cleaned, then colored in certain places the light would be hitting.
3. The basic colors from the color palette choices are put down.
4. Then I use a soft brush to add some soft shading.
5. Then a solid brush is used to add a cel shading looking effect, adding some bolder highlights and shadows.
6. The shiny shading is used to help indicate the metal material of the robot.
7. The final step is to add some soft color adjustments in an overlay layer to the whole piece. It’s usually pretty subtle, but I think it makes the character seem more real and as if the different colors are reacting to each other a bit more.

The only extra step is for the Solarpunk ring robots, who receive a bit of rust treatment to give them more of that worn down metal look. Once the art is finished and approved, it eventually gets put in the game! You can see the rest of the delivery robot characters below. It’s always rewarding to see them all together.

If you made it to the end, I want to thank you so much for reading! I hope this was entertaining and maybe even educational. If you would like to see more behind the scenes art like this from my work at VGI, you can check out my Patreon[www.patreon.com]. You can also follow me elsewhere here[linktr.ee]. Support the arts, be kind, and thank you again for taking time to learn more about my work!

- Finch