diseonfire:

Okay, so yes! I have lots of stuff to say about this and I’ll basically just show you what I do.

The answer to that is somewhere between yes and no. It depends on what exactly you want.

There is a lot of Adeptus Mechanicus artwork out there and I have a lot of tech-priests on my blog, all tagged and easy to find. You can search Tumblr, flick through the rule books for Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader or the Lathe Worlds for examples.

One thing about a lot of official art I notice however, is often it seems to be creating something really cool – but not something that could necessarily work in real life. This is more of a technical issue; you will notice often a lot of artists have trouble drawing tech-priest robes. The robes are painted on and don’t actually make much sense. How does the tech-priest get them on or off? How do the clothes function?

This goes for augments as well. Sometimes it looks to me like the tech-priest might not actually be able to have functional use of their limbs. It’s all very well and good to have syringes coming out of your fingertips but how are you going to open doors? (Looking at you, syringe guy.)

These guys look incredibly cool – but I often sit there wondering how exactly they get about doing things like going to the bathroom or cleaning themselves.

One hand wave is to say that’s what they have servo skulls for but eh. It is also possible they don’t actually move around much – so you could argue that a basis around your design could be what the tech-priest’s job actually is. It’s really up to you.

I have a few headcanons on the topic but anyway.

I generally find that the easiest way to work out how to draw tech-priests was to have some idea of how their augments were fitted to their body. Since of course there’s basically next to no artwork out there that shows tech-priest exclusive augments it’s pretty hard to get an idea how that works so it feels to me to be mostly guess work.

I will start by showing you how I think cybermantles and potentia coils fit to the body and to the mechadendrites that are perched there.

So it might also come out looking like this…

Or like so…

Mechadendrites can also be either segmented…

Or you have the flexible variety…

It seems the nature of the designs of their mechadendrite tools are also quite unique and highly varied, so don’t feel constrained to one design – just go nuts and have fun with it.

Basically it’s a huge galaxy and a very varied level quality of tech out there, so you can have a steampunk tech-priest if you want or one that looks like a medieval knight, if they’ve come from a feudal world.

One way to narrow down the choices and to work out what to draw, ask yourself these things:

1. Where does this tech-priest come from? Do they have a lot of money? Do they have a lot of access to resources like raw materials, high tech facilities, modern and high quality medical support? What kind of tech do they have available to them?

2. What does the tech-priest do for a job? Do they need to move around a lot? Do they have to have mobility? Will they be going outside in harsh weather a lot?

3. How senior are they? Basically, the older they are and the higher in rank they become, the more augments they have. Maybe you can use this to reflect changes in the quality and style of their augments if they’ve moved around from planet to planet a lot during their lives.

Stuff to consider.

Hope that helps.