Creating the art of Moebius Pioneers
Moebius Pioneers is the second premium collection by the Disco Solaris team and we’re extremely excited to tell you more about it!
Deadpaint, the artist behind our original drop, is once again performing her magic on all the art under my direction, but this time we’ve joined forces with Gotchi Labs and The Silk Toad to design character customization and other fun blockchain-based features together.
The Moebius Pioneers collection means the Disco Solaris Universe is expanding with:
We’ll be revealing these features down the road. Today, I’d like to focus on the art.
Let’s dive in!
One of our main objectives was to go to a new level art-wise.
To be more specific, we aimed to:
Here are the key objectives I wanted us to aim for:
Styles and poses
We went back to the drawing board and started from scratch. The goal: testing out different styles, poses, palettes and angles to arrive at a style we called “DS 2.0”.
These are some of the sketches we began with:
At this point we weren’t happy with any of the initial sketches. But we had some takeaways from these tests:
Also, with the first collection we wanted to go for a comic book style, with visible, unpolished strokes, to make it feel more human and hand drawn.
For Moebius Pioneers we decided to combine both: retain the comic book feel, but level it up in terms of style and polish – Disco Solaris 2.0.
Poses
Once we decided we wanted to go for a more detailed, classy style, we started testing some less usual poses.
Pose sketches:
We felt we were moving in the right direction in terms of the pose itself. So we started testing two versions of the “default” pose with a “naked” character that would become the basis for the collection (see the images below). Clothing layers would come later.
We wanted to see how these poses worked with different expressions (neutral, negative, positive), visible hands and items:
At first we decided that the front-facing position will give us more flexibility with traits. So we continued testing:
…and arrived at these WIP sketches:
We were getting somewhere, but we felt the lady lacked the level of charisma we were aiming for.
It’s very important for us to make the Disco Solaris citizens charismatic. We consider ourselves a high quality, classy brand with a swag and a tasteful amount of sexy. This needed to be reflected in the characters themselves.
So we got back in the trenches.
Since the bar was set high, I asked Deadpaint to do some more poses to better identify what could be improved. This is also when I had the idea of testing some unusual perspectives.
Perspective
We tried a 3/4 view (similar to the OG DS collection):
…and a completely new one, inspired by a non-DS artwork by Deadpaint I liked:
Several discord messages later, we decided to go for the 3/4 view. One of the main reasons was that we thought the “surveillance camera” view could make it too difficult to add the right amount of diversity (and some items held in hand would not fit in the shot). I still like it though – it felt fresh. We might come back to it in our other art.
Research
We take the integrity of Disco Solaris very seriously. While we don’t go into hard sci-fi, to balance the approachability with realism, we spend a lot of time discussing things like the fauna and flora of the planet, how Bug Brew is made, the influence of gravity and environmental conditions on different aspects of living in Neo Miami (from the laws of the city to sex 2.0) and a hundred other things. An internal lore document I created has about 50 pages, not including personal notes.
We even discuss some things with a scientist from the Disco community. Here’s a little screenshot to illustrate the amount of thinking going into this:
We also spend a lot of time going through 80s magazines, movies (“Revenge of the Nerds” was a painful re-watch), games, and books to make sure the fashion and nostalgia is strong with this one. Here are some shots that influenced Moebius Pioneers:
After all, the team consists of many 80s kids and science fiction nerds. Prepare for a shot of nostalgia straight to the heart!
Almost there!
So we arrived at this:
While Deadpaint was working on a 3/4 shot of the character, now with a black coat to see how it all blended together, I decided I wanted the main background of the collection to “jump out of the page” while scrolling Twitter. But only on the condition that the bg colour would work with our palettes.
When we saw this take, we knew we had something. But it needed more grit. This character has travelled between the stars and survived the harsh conditions of Moebius-9 to build a better world for humanity. We needed more wear and tear on that coat and maybe some influence of the planet reflected in her looks.
Thee wear and tear added character, but:
She was like a character from a 60s space opera, who never smiles, walks like a robot, wears the same crew outfit for years and says neoflowery things like: “The B-39 transponder has suffered subsystemic defibrillation when we entered the Sigma Quadrant, commander. We need to initiate quantum entanglement on grid 39.” in a monotone voice.
So the next version looked like this:
Days of churning out new art ensued. But I won’t go through all the little stages now. Instead, let’s add some diversity and look at the gentlemen.
We started testing the male models at this point, based on the WIP style developed for the ladies. This was the first take:
My opinion was that he didn’t look like someone who spent years fighting the harsh conditions of Moebius-9. Transforming Neo Miami from an outpost on a foreign planet to a fully-fledged city required a lot of strength and perseverance. The male model had to reflect that.
I also sent him to some female team & community members and the consensus was: this guy is not sexy enough and it’s unfair.
Notes: make him more “rugged” and sexy. MOAR testosterone!
So we went through some test body builds, broadening his face and shoulders, relaxing his pose, making his cheeks more prominent and such.
We wanted the males to have more of a “construction worker on a harsh planet type of body”, but nothing over the top, so that it would suit Moonrakers, corporate sharks, Discopunks and other Neo Miami dwellers.
When we were happy with the general style, perspective, body types and palettes, we started improving on the established style.
One of the last stylistic decisions was to add more negative space above the characters’ heads, to allow for some “breathing room” on top. Either that or we really wanted to include the 80s goth hairdo based on Robert Smith from The Cure. We’ll let you decide.
I’ll fast forward through some of those, in order not to make this article too long.
We took a long time to make sure we met the goal we set out for ourselves: to deliver a collection that looks fantastic, where holders can customise their characters to their liking.
From full-on 80s goth looks, through afros and disco shirts, to expensive suits and ties. From construction workers building Neo Miami, through Discopunks hoverboarding above the heads of NM policemen, to mysterious sweepers hiding behind killer-looking masks.
So without further ado, time for the art reveal!
Disco Solaris style 2.0
This is one of the citizens you’ll encounter in Neo Miami:
Some of the upgrades in the new style, visible on the citizen above:
At the moment we have: