Grazers Series
Grazers Series from Joel Vanboening
Grazers Series

A series of Sci-Fi illustrations for my parents' special days. An experiment in scifi skeuomorphosism & bright saturated colors.
A gas giant planet has some gasses that are valuable for industrial uses.
Extractor (grazer) robots suck up the valuable gasses & store them in their 2 tanks. They don't have any propulsion, in order to reduce costs. They drift & sail around the gas clouds using their movable solar panels as sails.
Sometimes they get in a place or current they can't get out of. Then a guiding robot with engines flies over & pushes them back to where they need to be. It uses its long array of articulating rollers.
When full, the grazers are pushed & pulled into the station. There they're emptied & released to repeat the process.
But rivals want to sabotage the station, so they deploy small leak-making robots. The station counters this with robot designed to catch the leakers. Finally, large transports carry the gasses to manufacturing centers around the solar system.

A herder (dog) robot sweeps an errant grazer (cow) robot back to greener gas pastures.
A turreted telescoping crook pulls grazers into the extraction station, which is vaguely patterned after a milking barn. Much electronic gossip ensues.
A rival corporation sends sabotaging mouse-like robots. They burst out of their cheese-like pod to drill holes in the storage tanks & vent the gas out of the nozzles in their heads. The station's cat-like security robot responds.
Transport vessels speed the extracted gas to faraway markets. Their shape is patterned off of engorged deer ticks because I thought it would be funny & humor is 1 of the goals for this project.
Ideation for both the grazer cow-like robots & herder dog-like robots. I used functional components (pumps, filters, sensors, solar panels, communications, etc.) as an aid in designing their appearances.
Ideation for the space station & herder dog-like robot. I wanted to give the dogbot the impression of being absurdly happy just to be there. This version of the space station turned out more malevolent-looking then I wanted for this series.
The final concept of the space station, based on a milking barn. A scifi shepherd's, or comedy stage, crook brings the passive grazers in.
Ideation of the cat-like security robot. I strove to create personality with just simple geometric shapes.
Ideation for the sabotaging mouse-like robots. They need lots of energy to power their drills, hence the 3 large batteries. They don't keep the gas that escapes, just vent it back out into space. The station's loss is its rival's gain. That way if the cheap mousebots get destroyed, it's no big loss to the rival.
Composition planning for the tick transport illustration. I strove for a sense of big, heavy (massive) loads being powerfully propelled away from the station. Because time is money. "Gas isn't massive!" you say? Well, it's been compressed into a liquid.
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Grazers Series

A series of Sci-Fi illustrations for my parents' special days. An experiment in scifi skeuomorphosism & bright saturated colors.
A gas giant planet has some gasses that are valuable for industrial uses.
Extractor (grazer) robots suck up the valuable gasses & store them in their 2 tanks. They don't have any propulsion, in order to reduce costs. They drift & sail around the gas clouds using their movable solar panels as sails.
Sometimes they get in a place or current they can't get out of. Then a guiding robot with engines flies over & pushes them back to where they need to be. It uses its long array of articulating rollers.
When full, the grazers are pushed & pulled into the station. There they're emptied & released to repeat the process.
But rivals want to sabotage the station, so they deploy small leak-making robots. The station counters this with robot designed to catch the leakers. Finally, large transports carry the gasses to manufacturing centers around the solar system.

Available
Freelance, Moonlighting
Joel Vanboening
Industrial Designer Covington, KY