Portfolio
forkl1ft
Concept artist focused on industrial and mech design, exploring exploring different styles like character creation.Currently building new work for Art Fight 2026 and expanding my portfolio after a multi-year hiatus.Available for freelance and collaboration.
Preparation for
Art Fight 2026
In preparation for Artfight 2026, I’ve decided to create some original characters to participate, below you’ll see a few stages of character creation.
Wrench
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Practices / Studies / Misc
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I own the rights to all of these images, they may not be used without my consent.
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Lore
World
World Overview
This is a frozen frontier world built on extraction, salvage, and war. Vast ice sheets cover old cities, factory zones, and buried machine yards, while the surviving population lives in clustered industrial settlements heated by reactors, furnace stacks, and salvage-burned scrap.
Winter is the world’s normal state. It brings long snowstorms, black ice, frozen roads, and buried cities, so every structure has to fight the environment just to remain standing. That makes machinery feel less like luxury and more like life support. But when summer comes, it’s brutal in contrast to the cold. It’s short, brutal, and dangerous. The ice melts fast, floods old ruins, exposes buried wrecks, and makes metal expand, crack, or fail. Salvage crews and factions move hard during this season because the world briefly opens up.
Core Idea
The planet’s economy runs on old war machines, factory parts, and frozen debris from past conflicts. Nothing affordable is truly “new” anymore, everything is repaired, cannibalized, or rebuilt from wreckage. There's a strong sense of decay and repetition, where progress is always made from leftovers. If you aren’t born rich, you probably never will be if you don’t work for it relentlessly.
This also means mechanics, welders, salvage crews, and machine haulers are essential people, not background workers. They are the ones keeping whole settlements alive, especially when power, heat, and transportation all depend on broken equipment staying functional.
The rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, there is no middleground.
History of the World
At some point, the world entered a long industrial boom driven by mining, machine production, and military development. Eventually that turned into a resource war, and the war never really ended, it just froze over. Cities fell, transport routes were lost to snow, and the remaining population adapted by turning wreckage into infrastructure.
Corporations once controlled the biggest machine yards, hangars, and factory docks. When those systems collapsed, they left behind half-buried industrial skeletons under the ice like assembly lines, mech depots, cargo bays, and ruined transport hubs.
In summer, the thaw exposes those ruins again, which means every warm season becomes a race to salvage what winter won’t let anyone reach.
Factions
Industrial Holds
Large fortified settlements built around power plants, smelters, and repair yards. They keep the lights on and the heat running, but they are often strict, heavily monitored, and politically controlling.
Salvage Guilds
Loose networks of mechanics, haulers, and scrap traders. They are half trade union, half black-market economy.
Machine Militaries
Factions that still use mechs, loaders, and armored walkers as military assets. They rely heavily on mechanics but treat them as expendable.
Ice Nomads
Outcast groups that travel between wreck sites and abandoned outposts, surviving by stripping old tech and trading fuel, parts, and batteries.
Corporate Remnants
The old companies never fully died. They still own patents, machine blueprints, and claims on buried industrial zones. They may not have armies anymore, but they have lawyers, mercenaries, and private recovery teams.
Characters
Wrench
| Appearance: | Wears a welding mask, heavy work jacket, heavy gloves, knee pads, and steel-toe boots |
| Backstory: | He used to work in industrial docks and machine yards before everything went bad |
| Faction: | Independent |
| Current life: | He survives by salvaging, repairing, and keeping dying machines alive just long enough to matter again |
| Environment: | Half-buried hangars, wrecked loaders, dead mechs, and frozen scrapyards |
| Job: | Keeps broken machines moving and strips useful parts from wrecks |
| Moral code: | He respects machines and the people inside them |
| Personality: | Practical, hard to impress, and very experienced |
| Reputation: | The person people call when a mech is damaged, stranded, or about to die |
| Role: | Mechanic, salvage worker, and battlefield recovery |
| Weapon: | Carries a huge wrench that works as both a repair tool and a weapon |
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Wrench
Sketches and Artworks that feature Wrench
