Engineering on Friday 'toon: We Heart Field Engineers

What would we do without them? They're truly unsung heroes. 

Read my big article celebrating the field engineer here, and you can see the original coloring I did for this image. Having tagged along with field engineering, I witnessed firsthand the effort they put into the job. They’re climbing towers, getting into sewers, reaching areas humans should probably not venture to begin with.

I remember going to a warehouse/factory for a CO₂ fire suppression test. The whole factory building instantly flooded with CO₂. The sound was something out of a kaiju movie. The scene, too (I wasn’t allowed to film it, unfortunately).

After the test was completed and the CO₂ clouds started dissipating, I had to climb down into the sub-basements with a small group of engineers to see why the CO₂ measurement was not being reported correctly from there. I climbed through the workings of some machine. It looked like a combined giant mill and roller press. Like a big metal mouth. If it turned on, I would have been turned into some sort of near two-dimensional material.

After navigating this machine’s underbelly, it turned out that CO₂ froze in the test lines, blocking further measurements. We pulled the test lines up and out of the machine. Like any field engineer, mere moments and tiny distances from certain doom.

They deserve all of the hearts we can muster.

I originally drew the engineer and robot characters on paper, scanned it, and colored it digitally with a mouse a long time ago. I slapped it on a background. Then I wanted to draw a different background.

And recently, I wanted to update it with my more modern process of hand-drawing new details, shading, and coloring.

I added light and shadow highlights to the characters and background. I actually noticed I didn’t color parts of my original.

I’m still not happy with the background. This is the third iteration of it. I thought maybe if I made mostly white and gray buildings behind, the color characters would pop more. It was a lot of drawing to find out, maybe not so much. Will there be another background someday? Yes, definitely. Someday.

See rest of my cartoons in the Engineering on Friday comic gallery.