Meet Aniela! (pronounced Ah-Nyell-Uh, the polish word for gracious/merciful!) She’s programmed to be 24 years old, and is a very kind and gentle robot! She’s loyal, trusting, funny, witty, passionate, sensitive, and a little clingy. Her hobbies include listening to punk music, going for walks basically everywhere, collecting trinkets, watching TV, blogging, and dancing around her apartment when no one’s around.
She’s also openly lesbian, and is always daydreaming about meeting the girl of her dreams, human or robot. She’s a bit of a sappy romantic type when it comes to thinking or talking about women and relationships. Also, another important note is that while her story is still in development, it's established that her story is separate from all other OCs. More details to come later! I'll update this project as I go along!
[Below: Original draft when I first envisioned her character (left) followed by the first "upgraded" sketches of what would become her final design! (right)]
(Above: Different color idea/pallets I experimented with before landing on her current pallet followed by stages from a clean sketch to a flat colored trial render)
(Below: Explorations!)
For these ones, I drew out her when she’s in one of her favorite outfits! I also drew this one out to go along with the playlist I made with all of her favorite songs over on Spotify! (They’re also a lot of my favorites too!) Plus, I had fun playing around with different rendering styles too! The last one is really experimental, but I had fun with it anyways!
(Above: Sometimes Aniela finds herself wondering about who she really is, and what it means to be an emotionally functioning and an intelligent, self-aware robot. She doesn't like to think about it. Below: Aniela looking adorable as all heck while also being gay as hell with various lesbian flags! 🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈)
When I was thinking up Aniela as a character, I was trying to think about something I haven't done yet with many of my robot characters yet. I wanted to try a few different things with her design, and I'm really glad I stepped out of my comfort zone and got to where she's at now! For one thing, she's a robot lady in contrast to all my other OC's, who mostly happen to be male. I sort of fell into the habit of making a mostly all-male cast of characters. While there's nothing really wrong with that, I wanted to spice things up! Plus, I missed drawing cute girls.
Another thing that I implemented that was brand new to my cast is the fact that she doesn't wear clothes at times and it's totally normal. None of my robots technically need to wear clothes, but everyone else I wrote to end up using clothing/fashion as a mean of self expression, despite the fact that they're robots with nothing that requires covering up like humans do. Of course, Aniela is no different! She loves dressing up, but she doesn't always bother with it.
After thinking about other fictional robots from TV shows and cartoons I watch, it occurred to me that many of them don't wear any clothing unless they want to, and the idea clicked in my head that for once maybe one of my bots should have the same attitude! So then, I adjusted her character design from that point forward, designing her body to still be read as casual and non-sexualized while appearing nude.
I felt strongly that I wanted to implement this idea with her character for another reason too: that in these shows and cartoons, it's only ever the male robots who are allowed to be without clothes, while the women robots always seem to be fully dressed the way human ladies are. I wanted to show that a female presenting robotic character could be viewed just as normal and casually as any male robotic character. Plus, she was just super fun to design in general too!
Aniela was a previously un-named OC that I came up with based on a design idea I had stuck in my head last week. I had no plans to develop her past her first design with the bright colors and the dress, and it just felt like a plain idea to me. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with her and wasn’t even sure she would become an official OC, but after a random but welcomed 3:00am burst creative energy, I’m pretty satisfied with her new current design and personality so far! I hope you like her as much as I do!
Here's Penn hanging out with my other OC Penn! (Of course with some added retro vibes too!) 🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
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(Note: This project is BRAND NEW! More media/drawings exploring/featuring Aniela will be coming soon!)
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(Note: This project is BRAND NEW! More media/drawings exploring/featuring Aniela will be coming soon!)
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(All characters and artwork shown © Allison Gajewski - 2019, 2021)
