Project Description

INKTOBER 2022 Day #30: GEAR.

Yet another highly influential intellectual property I am amazed I haven’t referenced yet: Robotech. I watched this cartoon religiously growing up, I made references to it regularly among my friends (who also watched it). I discovered, collected, and read the full novelization of the show, and I spent a summer watching it with my kids. Robotech was an American “big robots and space aliens” sci-fi show cobbled together from three unrelated Japanese cartoons. It was an epic, character driven, multi-generational space opera chock full of drama, relationships, and of course glorious big-transforming-robots-fighting-bad-aliens. It is awesome. At some point in my high school years, my friends and I got our hands on some of the Japanese versions of the first generation of the show, Macross, which was also great, but not as epic in my opinion. Robotech was one of my first introductions into anime and manga, both mediums that have had a huge influence on me artistically and creatively.

This particular image of PMD dressed as Rick Hunter, sitting on the shoulder of the Skull Squadron veritech fighter is also a bit of a throwback to a similar, but simpler, illustration I did many years ago for a good friend’s wedding card. He was also a huge fan of Robotech, and lead a bunch of us on a Robotech, D&D-style role playing game. This particular illustration clocks in at about 8 hours from sketch to scan, likely taking much longer than my only other idea for this prompt: PMD putting a plunger on a big gear. There may not be any visible gears in this illustration, but that veritech fighter is bound to be packed full of ’em.