Designs, designs, designs, choices, choices, choices.

 I went about the design stage of this project with the intention of getting every idea I possibly could down on paper, (or digital paper). From these I could choose my favourite designs or bits of designs and put them all together into a smaller series of better options.

With this in mind I started sketching out absolutely anything that came to mind, no idea was too strange or too ridiculous. There were two kinds of design during this process that I tried to explore; intentional and accidental.

When I say intentional I mean I went into the drawing with some idea of what it was that I wanted to create. Obviously every design was supposed to show some armour in some way but I might go in with the idea that this exact design has to incorporate a lot of pipes, or maybe I wanted big clunky armour for this design which would be more of a walking tank than a suit or armour. If it was an overall idea, or a mental image of a small part of the design, I would scribble it down, in many cases trying to design a suit around that feature that fit with the visual style.

However more of these designs I went into either with no idea what I wanted to draw or with a deliberately blank mind. I started by exploring abstract shapes and bizarre forms, but soon realised this was not going to work for my project. This armour is meant to be a robot style suit, I knew I would break a few of the rules of anatomy in the process but I still knew every design would have two legs, two arms, a torso and a head. There was definitely room for some imaginative wiggle room around this, but the basic silhouette of the armours would be very similar, both to each other, and to a normal human.

I found from this that rather than crafting strange silhouettes to create something with a visually unique form, I needed to explore each design with more detail. I still intended to attempt to cause happy accidents that would influence my design in ways I would not have thought of but it needed to be with details as well as larger shapes. Often this meant I would start to scribble in the rough shape of a person and see what forms the lines created. For anyone interested I started sketching in Photoshop but moved to Autodesk's SketchBook Pro. The drawings in SBP feel much more like drawing with a real pencil, and there are less features getting in the way of a simple sketch. Plus you can draw in symmetry which helped me to speed up considerably.

I scribbled and scribbled every design I could think of and tried to discover all of the ones that I couldn't. Some designs were just helmets, others torsos, and even a few full designs. Some designs were taken to full completion, and others abandoned part way through lack of interest, or further ideas. Their are side views and front views, some combos of the two and a handful of 3/4 views just to mix things up. All in all I ended up sketching 52 drawings, 43 helmets, 22 torsos, 18 arms and 15 legs.

Once it was all done and my brain was drained of all creative thoughts, I sat down and went through every design making notes of the sections I liked and the sections I didn't. This was a very interesting process as it is not something that I have done before. It was also interesting to look at each design in an objective way, and finding that the majority of the time every design had both good and bad points.

The next stage is to take all of these good design points and put them all together into a small collection of designs. This may been putting a number of good parts into a single design, or could be further exploring part of a design to create a suit around it. Apologies for the large image, I wanted to make sure all of the images were viewable at the size they were displayed. Enjoy.