Welcome back, boys and girls! I hope you’re as excited as I am for another week of old mecha drawings! Maybe my mania isn’t as engrossing for you as it is for me. But I just love designing robots and other cool stuff… but, y’know, particularly robots.

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Dai Polarion is another super robot from the Giant Robot Universe. Manufactured by the Mechaworks division of Alliance-based think tank Limitless Logic Leap (L3 for short) and piloted by a specially chosen candidate in hot-blooded Jackie Otsuyama, the Dai Polarion is a platform for truly advanced Alliance technology. Like all Brave Armours, the Dai Polarion is a large machine that benefits from thick armour and the steely will of its pilot to see it through attacks. Its armament is focused around the Zwitterion Pylons which allow it to generate and manipulate vast quantities of energy in astonishing ways.

 

The TEX-800 here is a bit of the odd man out of these designs. I had been working on a comic book proposal for a Post-Apocalyptic Giant Robot Western and was reveling in the idea that I might be able to include parts of it into my wider Giant Robot Universe. The TEX-800 was to be a successor of the TEX-666 from my comic, however at the moment that comic has been indefinitely sidelined as the artist whom I was paying and I have reached an impasse in our working relationship. It seems likely that it may, in fact, never see the light of day. Working with other people is hard, particularly when they don’t share your passion to do things and are not willing to be in it for the long haul.

Herein I was inspired by two specific elements of preexisting Super Robot meta-fiction. First, as one can obviously tell, from the name and design, the DLD-10001 is based on the idea of mecha with female body types, akin to those one would see in 70s anime like Mazinger Z. The second inspiration is in that DLD, that Dynamic Lady Defender, riffing off of the Super Robot Wars Dynamic General Guardian, or DGG, line of mecha but (of course) these ones will all be feminine.

The Voodoo Hummingbird is one of my favourite designs from this sketchbook, where I pushed myself to do things I would otherwise not have chosen to do in my mecha design process, such as have the feet attached firmly to the lower leg to convey that this machine in meant more for space combat than ground based fights. As a limited production machine it is intended to be highly effective and powerful, and the reason i chose to have one remaining in LLLM (L3M?) hangars is because, as this was intended to be for a grand scale RPG, I wanted the player to be able to obtain one. I can’t remember if the 3 that are together, and have been given special names, were stolen by pirates or part of a black ops crew. I’m leaning towards pirates.

The XLR Evolver is my most Gundam design yet, and is intended to evoke those Gundam designs that had the multiple different parts you could swap on and off of them. I tried to evoke Gundam without ripping off any specific design and I feel I have mostly accomplished that here. This name and mecha design have stuck with me for a while. The original drawing I did of this idea was old. Way old. It sadly had to be thrown out because a cat got between the ceiling and the floor and pissed in there, and it rained down upon my drawing. No jokes. Terrible moment to all of a sudden have urine falling on you from on high. Not much I can say about this other than that anecdote, I think. It is pretty self evident that it is inspired by the original RX-78 and that I did my best to give it a unique head design and body part styling. Oh well…

And last and probably least we have this…

This was the inteded Samurai-Package for the XLR Evolver that I never finished. I really liked some of the ideas here but I was going at it without a pan form the beginning and I totally butchered the proportions I had established on the original XLR drawing. I’m not entirely certain how much of this is salvageable, but I really liked the collection of additional beam sabers on his shoulder.

Well, that’s it for this first set of Mecha Mania weeks! I had some weird little doodles I did somewhere of some other mecha from the Giant Robot Universe but presently cannot find them. If I do, I’m certain you’ll get to see them too. And I have some other mecha designs that are intended for the GRU which weren’t done in the same sketchbook or format at all, so they’ll have to be for another time.

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