Old Thorbjorn mech, hirez

Here's an old piece from 2000 which I never posted in high rez. I found some notes about it in a text file, included below. Possibly it was inked in late '99 and coloured once I got my first flatbed scanner.

The original ink was A4 size which I scanned as line art (1-bit) and colored using Painter 3, floaters (what are floaters? I've forgotten) and the airbrush. The font is Metrostyle, which came with Adobe Imagestyler (I used this for text effects back then, but many of its features got moved into Photoshop later?).

Mech specification:

B108aHc - Baelfire Systems Model 108 - Alpha Class - Heavy Configuration

This mech has survived the Harmageddon campaign fought in the perimeters of the Sol system. It is often referred to as Thorbjorn or just Thor by its crew. Thor's primary weapon is the Gaus [sic] cannon (not illustrated here). It is 17.3 meters tall and has a weight of 21 tons*. Besides the thick armour it is protected by a powerful warp field. This field uses an insane amount of power when active so a nuclear power reactor is also fitted in Thor's shell. The massive weight sometimes makes Thor vulnerable on the battefield. In case of emergency it may eject the power source and use reserve thrusters to escape from the danger, and detonate the reactor. This was the case at the battle on Titan a few years ago.

Thor is crewed by the young and charismatic pilot Luna. Luna has an almost perfect record but also a very bad temper. This have put her in serious danger at several occasions but she always manage to escape in one piece.

* 21 tons huh?. It is less than half of an RX-78 @ 18m. A stocky human that height might be 100 tons, but maybe it's built out of very lightweight materials (0.2 density). It pretty much has to be.

As for the art... back then a lot of people just used the airbrush tool to colour digitally (often pencil and ink sketches). Painter 3 (IIRC I got a full free version on a CD as it was already old at the time) had some more fancy brushes which I experimented with but nothing much came of it. Eventually I changed operating systems and could no longer load the old .RIF files. I also had an image viewer, ACDSEE I believe, which could display all sorts of files including Painter 3's .RIF format, which might've been irregular.

Still doing Big Feet then. Left and right shield thingies don't match, and the overall mechanics are lacking... it's mostly masses vaguely blobbed together. I like the head still. Could probably salvage the design by changing the proportions and clarifying the joint areas.