ChifiBots - Design Contest

While I am not posting very often at the moment I am still reading and curating content. That is how a couple of weeks back I stumbled across this post by @nftstudios announcing their contest to design the Hive Power robot for their upcoming card game ChiFiBots.

I had heard of ChifiBots late last year when they had a pre-sale and I bought a starter pack (Tier 4) but I haven't heard much since then. Recently, they have initiated a weekly update on their blog, so hopefully, there will be more information soon.

Anyhow, so I saw the contest and thought that a robot chibi design would be the perfect opportunity to practice some vector art. I honestly am more of a pixel artist and have not done very much in vector. But I have to say that it can - in a way - be very much like zen doodling which I have done on and off for years. Here's a link to Google Images Search in case you're curious about zen-doodling.

When you are working in vector art, you are manipulating a multitude of nodes, and every little push or pull will change the curve, the line art. You can zoom in and out of vector art and the image will always scale beautifully without pixelation. Hence most game art, if not all, is done in vector.

Here is my finished ChiFiBot Hive Power.

As you can see I opted for a half robot/half human which will likely disqualify me from the contest but that is o.k. I usually see a contest as an inspiration to come up with something to draw or paint. For me personally, Hive's biggest asset is the human social network henceI didn't want to go 100 % robot but instead show a human side of our buzzy bee as well, the side that is holding her

Mighty shield of Hive Power!

Here is the initial sketch in the dashboard of the Desktop version of Affinity Designer the vector program that I use. But I created 99.9% of this piece on my iPad Pro, also in Affinity Designer. Only to make the gif at the bottom of the post I switched to my computer because I always create those in Photoshop.

When I did this in Designer I simply forgot to take screenshots of all the gazillion of in-between steps to show you how my little chibi half-robot evolved. This has become almost second nature unless I use software that records time-lapses e.g. Procreate.

I feel like you can do this with Affinity Designer as well or somehow on the iPad but I didn't think about it and now it is too late. Next time. Maybe.

Here I zoomed in a little bit to show you the Hive Power 😁. But in the next two photos, you can see a lot of the details much better. I gave the skin a bit of a honeycomb overlay and the metal part of the robot definitely needed some rivets.

Everything is hand-drawn except for the necklace which is a chain brush that I added to my Designer. The human eye is my nod to manga (chibi) and I really like how the hair turned out.

This last photo shows you the detail on her robo-leg with mantlets, and joints held by rivets. On the other hand, the human side sparkles with an ankle bracelet.