It's been a while since I've done anything large with lineart, and even longer since I've spent this much time on a single illustration. I made this as an excuse to play with watercolors, or at least digital watercolors, just something to get me out of my comfort zone of chunky oil paints, but I've been working on this thing for so long that I forgot about that original intention midway through and picked up the oil brushes. Since water and oil simply don't mix, it ended in quite the mess, so I had to crank up the eye candy to 11 to hide it.
That's the thing with experiments; sometimes they lead to train wrecks, and you have to get the glitter out if you want to salvage them.
Since I've spent so long on this thing, I decided to do something I don't usually do, and that is write some text for it!
Usually, with illustrations, I figure out the characters' deal as I lay down paint, just to have something for my brain to chew on, but I never have a reason to write it down. So I thought, why not give it a shot this time? At least to get something out of what I've been chewing for so long. So here's the result:
Truck Mafia—that's the only discernible marking anyone remembers after seeing this cryptid behemoth of a truck.
Seemingly coming out of nowhere, word of an imported, heavy tractor truck doing freelance work spread around the establishing oil companies and timber mills, yet nothing was known about the owner and driver behind it, as it seemed to never stop for anything but refueling.
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Not willing to miss the opportunity to make use of a transport of such weight in the newly establishing area. A few contractors decided to break the ice by predicting the path it would take off of local sightings, then contacting the owner of a service station on its path to get the contact information of this elusive freelancer and—both as proof and out of curiosity—take a photo of them.
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And there they were, wearing nothing but an oversized sweater, cold-blooded yet seemingly unbothered by the cold, effortlessly transporting the logs that had paralyzed a local timber mill because none of their trucks could get them out.
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Once this information was known among contractors, work offers with generous wages started to pour in, as every local company had a need for a heavy truck capable of handling oversized loads.
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Truck Mafia then became the oversized truck to pick amongst the local companies. The nickname stuck, as it seemingly disappeared overnight, with no apparent home or garage where it belonged, simply appearing where it was needed. The only places where it was seen with no load were parked at local convenience stores, as if it were a regular pickup truck.
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Still very little was known about its driver, although with time, bits and pieces of information started to shape up their reality:
The reason why they seemed to never stop and appear out of nowhere was because they simply lived inside their truck, parking wherever the dusk caught them for the night, something unheard of in such a hostile environment, and even less so in a truck with a plain cabin. How they manage this is still a mystery, since few have seen the interior of the truck. The only time when they may stay anywhere that is not the truck is whenever it is put under maintenance, renting a room at a hotel and hitching rides to move around until they can get back on the mud.
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Almost no one knew their name, and most simply called them "Truck Mafia" while referring to them and the truck, yet the few people that saw them regularly started to call them "Maffy", as a short form of "Truck Mafia," appropriately blending truck and driver into one entity.
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Where they came from is unknown, yet it's likely that they held this style of life there before arriving, as they mentioned that a reason for why they had moved alongside their truck and everything they owned, was to find better-paying jobs across seas, and because they had grown tired of their homeland.
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Once the oil rigs started to settle into operation, and more oversized trucks started to appear under their demand, offers started to dwindle. To which, Maffy, after completing a contract on the northern edge, simply kept moving north, towards the newer rigs, repeating the same nomadic cycle.
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How or why someone may follow such a lone and transient lifestyle is something one can only truly guess at, as they never stuck around long enough for anyone to get to know them that well.
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(This whole thing may or may not be just an excuse for why your character never leaves their truck in SnowRunner, and I've just realized that.)
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