We wanted to bang out a retro spider Mech. This idea came out of an old discussion we had with a co-worker of ours over the aesthetics of a racing game we were working on. "Diesel Punk" was a term that was thrown around as a potential design skin. We didn't move forward with that theming, but we would occasionally wonder about the genre because it's not a design space that people usually explore. In entertainment art, space-age sci-fi and heroic fantasy are the norm - probably because people are majorly concerned about where the human race is going and also where it came from (in its history and its myths). Alternate history as a genre is a kind of a niche spectacle that asks, "what if we went THIS way at this point" and that discussion could be a stage for stories that use the context of their chosen era as fuel for implication through plot, but stories like that demand some pre-requisite knowledge for exploring events that didn't happen.

We thought a tall silhouette would be interesting because it gave us some space to build-in a giant exposed engine. We had an urge to go sci-fi on a circular component between the legs and just went ahead with it. A tall silhouette for this mech and its spider legs also adds a glistening of surreality. We see vehicles as horizontal machines, not vertical. This is a design that betrays the norm. Now, I had a friend who brought this up to me and that's why we want to include him in these journals. Its to be credited. We know a pretty wise concept artist that gave us allot of things to think about. I know he wanted Sanders to have his level of insight. Sanders should know about that.

Well we have to be off the races I suppose, but the last time we tried that it didn't work. It was over a game called WindRush where we committed to a project that none of us cared about. I have an urge to mastermind Sanders still, but I really just need to sit down and either paint with him or feed his brain. We'll do both and hopefully we will visit strong insights with which to delight our customers in the form of paintings, sculptures, animation, and whatever else we can think of. I'm listening to solar fields from mirrors edge as i'm writing this and I can't help but feel totally into journaling. The problem is that i'm using allot of retro-fed ideas, but I want to use them as a means of giving it to Sanders.

This surreality thing though, it really jives with us. We like painting the abnormal. We like making things that are appealing but also advance towards the strange. We say advance because, if you're a designer, making a "fresh one" is an achievement in a world full of derivative ideas. We're not saying our mech is very original, it probably isn't, but that's what I'm interested in doing with art sometimes.... among other things. It feels good to put out something that you feel like you have discovered. Frankly, there are allot of fresh things to discover within normality... particularly in the realm of what you associate with and why you make the seemingly ordinary choices that you do. We are very interested in this subject right now. Its what we want to do. There's like a tug of war between doing commissions, art for ourselves, or just reading and taking in new information. New information feels painful now thought because of our life circumstances.

I have to counter what i've been saying about fresh though. Sometimes being derivative is a great pleasure. Its sort of like saying, "okay, he made is this way - i'm going to make mine my way" and there isn't a problem with that at all. Frankly its what most people do when they set out to make a picture. Imagine a person who is uncomfortable with ideas that have already been done, how often does that person draw?