Robert Wagonthorpe Concept Art

Hey all! I was thinking about stuff I could show you guys since I'm on a little break this month, and I thought I'd share some of the concept art for Robert Wagonthorpe from chapter one of Ingress!

Robert is a character that was made almost entirely during a long car ride back home, when I started thinking about what I wanted to make a comic about. He was a character pretty much meant to introduce the audience to the world, and to introduce the audience to Toivo.

Here's some of the first expression tests I did of Robert when I was trying to figure out how to draw him! These are all from January 2017.

Here's a Robert where I was trying to figure out his outfit:

Clearly, an important part of the story that Robert is in is that he transforms into a terrible monster. The initial concept of that wasn't so clear cut as an emerald that transforms whoever touches it into a monster. I think I even had some other items that I was considering using.

That said, the initial "monster Robert" ideas are WAY different than what I ended up going with. While I ultimately chose the emerald golem as the monster, I really like some of these designs, and even prefer a few of them over what ended up in the chapter. It just didn't make a ton of sense from a logical standpoint why an emerald would turn some guy into a weird blob demon, which is why they were ultimately scrapped.

These first concepts were very much Ghibli inspired, like some of the creatures in spirited away. (No face was a big inspiration for that first one)

This next one is probably more Full Metal Alchemist inspired. I still really like this one, and am kinda bummed I didn't get to use it.

This next one was a continuation of the last one, where I was trying to figure out how it might move or if I could get some of the same shapes. I didn't like it as much, but it was still fun.

After that I decided that the crystal monster was a better idea, and the concept art was pretty similar to the final result.

As you can tell, it was very important to me that Robert kept his hat in all iterations of himself.