Infinite Painter SPEEDPAINT A MECH DESIGN

Kobe Sek shares his process of sketching mechs with negative space, creating a vibrant and colourful concept

- Kobe Sek

Playing with shapes, colour, and lighting is like meditating. So I often carry my iPad with me and take inspiration from everywhere. I look around and figure out what’s worth “stealing”. It can be a question that occurs to me, an event, eating food, and so on. Ideas are everywhere. I believe that nothing’s new. Everything is about copying, combining, and transforming.

I love cyberpunk, but not the gloomy part. As technology plays an increasingly significant role in our lives, I always wonder how humans interact with AI, robots, and mechs.

This genre enables me to imagine and express mechanical shapes, experiment with the big, medium, and small forms, and paint colourful elements such as neon signboards and hologram advertisements.

For this workshop, I’ll explain my process from doodling to concept design, how I made decisions, and how the plan evolved along the process. I spent around four hours on this and mainly focused on the overall shapes, colour and lighting.

I doodle thumbnails with negative space, sometimes colour blocking. I use colour picking from references and reuse my existing artwork with clipping masks to create the base color and lighting. Occasionally, I’ll photo-bash elements if required. More details in the steps below…

1 Doodle with negative space

This is my default method of exploring shapes. This is a fun way to stay loose and abstract. I can play around with big, medium, and small shapes while keeping the composition and basic functionality in mind. I’m always fascinated by how many ideas we can extract from just observing the negative space of a subject.