No release date. No studio announcement. Just the work, published as it happens — character design, model sheets, colour, and the slow business of making a world stay consistent.
Every character is drawn from four angles at identical scale before a single scene is illustrated. Without this, Hugh would look slightly different on every page.
Hugh, William Harper, Nella Brooks, Max, Sophie Miller, Benjamin Carter and Thomas Reed.
All four views at the same scale, the same lighting and the same level of detail, on a transparent background.
With the cast complete, design moves on to Maple Creek, the workshop and the city of Lumina.
Simplified, friendly forms with clear silhouettes and readable emotion. Never photoreal, never a flat cartoon.
Light, materials, tools, the workshop, the city, the weather. Worn leather behaves like worn leather.
Why Hugh has two blue eyes. Early designs gave him one glowing eye and one dark sensor. It looked striking and it was wrong: it made him read as a machine instead of a child. Both eyes now glow, always, from every angle.
“A perfect robot is a boring robot.” Grandpa