A 93-million-year-old war nanorobot in goddess form

Another commission for my generous patron J. M. for Robert Reed's Great Ship universe, an outlandish entity, described by J. M. as:

"...an enormous military-industrial robot, 93 millions of years old, and the last relic of an ancient extragalactic war of conquest. Who also happens to be an exceptionally charming and beautiful woman, and a good friend and colleague to a major human character. So, a classic Great Ship entity. "

It's neat that the author is obviously self-aware of how outlandish these characters are. It makes for scenes like this:

“I’m older than you realize,” she began.
“I see ten million years.”
 “I’m far older than that, sir.”

In the story, Beautiful Machine, this is pretty much all the description we are given:

The tool was large before she dressed, and she was gigantic now. The carapace was Mandelbrot-inspired, made from lovely diamond and a lovelier iron, and it was punctured in dozens of places. Where needed, arms and legs had been added. What wasn’t a mouth produced words, and what couldn’t be confused for eyes were staring at the human who demanded to be impressed.

How to tackle such an impossible character? I started off with unplanned doodles, inspired by Near Eastern goddesses, and uncanny depictions of "Jinn Mothers".

Inspired loosely by these forms, these were my sketches:

We combined the best bits from multiple sketches to generate this collage-study template. To visualize the character's multiple arms, I just copied and pasted bits of wooden art marionettes' arms.

Here is the detailed drawing I made by layering a sheet of transparent paper over a printout of the collage above:

A lot of little things got corrected when I scanned and cleaned this drawing.

Screentones really made a world of difference for this one!

And finally, colour! Painting the figure took an entire day.

In all, this was a phenomenal commission. Thank you all for your support on Patreon, and beyond.