On Drawing Mechs: Adapted from my advice to an anonymous asker on tumblr

I will preface this with the same piece of advice that I always give people: you get good at art by practicing. If you're not consistently drawing and working on improving, you gotta get into the habit of that first. With that out of the way'.

In terms of the actual drawing, you gotta be comfortable drawing lots of boxes and cylinders in perspective. That's crucial for getting stuff like weapons and limbs looking good. The underlying structure of lots of mechanical things like mechs or other vehicles are often pretty basic and it's the details you add on top that make them interesting. But make no mistake, you have to get the structure down first or else nothing's going to look good. Here's some examples from my own drawings where I've tried to point out the usage of very basic forms underlying everything else:

Now do you need to get out a ruler and protractor and plot out every single point of every geometrical figure exactly right, Scott Robertson style? Absolutely not (although it doesn't hurt to be able to and I encourage you to try that as an exercise!) But you should be pretty comfortable drawing basic forms in perspective.

When you can do that, the next step is being able to actually design a mech from scratch and this is where it gets a bit harder but also where the fun really begins. Probably everyone has a different approach to this- I'm just gonna walk you through how I do it. Usually I have a vague idea for both the visual appearance and the 'context' of a mech before I draw it and I develop both of these together because they both influence each other. By 'context' I mean, 'in what kind of world could this exist?' I think this is an important question to ask with mechs because in reality they probably don't make much sense. In most applications, a wheeled or tracked vehicle would probably work better. And sometimes you just want to draw a cool robot and that's it and the context doesn't matter. But personally, I think I draw more interesting mechs when I think about what they're built for and the world in which they exist. There's sort of a 'plausability spectrum' for mecha with somewhat realistic designs on one end and bonkers stuff on the other.

On the realistic end you have stuff that's smaller, more compact. These might be deployed in places with rough terrain where a car won't cut it. They're probably not much bigger than a hardsuit and if they are, they're probably quadrapedal or hexapedal for stability and weight distribution. For inspiration look to Simon Roy, Boston Dynamics, Maschinen Krieger, GitS, and real-world legged vehicles:

Past realism there's a huge realm of mecha designs that I would call 'plausible-in-context.' Mechs that are built more on rule-of-cool than practicality but have in-universe justifications and fit the setting. Star Wars, Lancer, Battletech, Gundam and honestly probably the vast majority of mech designs fit in here.

 

 

On the bonkers side you get it all. Stuff that's definitely there to look cool before anything else or stuff with pretty noticeable fantasy elements. Gurren Lagann, Mony Pich's stuff, Ghibli mechs, the work of Makoto Kobayashi, and Shining Force fit here.

Think about where your mech exists on the spectrum and come up with a little backstory for it. Is it a robotic pack mule accompanying spec ops teams into the mountains? Is it the emperor's mechanotitan guard automaton from the ancient times? This the kind of stuff that influences how I draw a mech. Think about what it does, how that would impact how it looks visually, do thumbnails, work out the kinks and pretty soon you'll find yourself with something you like. I use reference pretty liberally at this stage, either looking at art I like or real-world mechanical details, or weapon designs. Don't be afraid to use any and all reference! You learn by studying others and the real world.

Once I've got the design pretty much figured out that's when I finally work out the composition/posing of the final drawing and polish it off. Doing it this way takes me a while. I know people who can just draw cool mechs off the top of their head and that's a totally valid way to do it as well! But this is the process that, right now, works pretty well for me.

Last little note- something I struggled with for a long time was making mechanical joints look good. My advice is to heavily reference other artists and see how they do it. Someone like Ryan Barry might go ham on the details and greebles:

Whereas monypich might cover lots of stuff up in smooth armor plating:

There are many, many different solutions. Use your judgement and don't feel like you have to figure it out for yourself! It's okay to take inspiration from others.

Hope this helps!