Artist's commentary
Cloud White the Robot Fox Ver. 1
Cloud White is a key character of Electric Hearts. This is his version 2 design back in 2010, he was a robot fox in this version. He was changed to be a robot rabbit in later iterations.
In early iterations of Electric Hearts, Cloud was a messenger sent by the robot civilizations to search for their home planet — Earth. He has a shape-shifting body and floating arms — very futuristic design choices. There was no particular reason for him to an arctic fox, except perhaps it was a popular choice to have a fox character.
Cloud’s design had many iterations in the following years. He was sometime biologic, sometimes robotic, sometimes a fox, sometimes a rabbit. However, even in the first iteration, he already looks like a rabbit, which is exactly what he ended up to be.
This picture was created using GIMP. GIMP is a free and open source image manipulation app. I was inspired by other FOSS apps like Firefox and OpenOffice back then, and had entertained the idea of going full free and open source. I used GIMP 2.4 (GIMP Paint Studio/GPS mod) for this picture, and it was my first ever attempt to draw without Photoshop. I could not remember my GIMP experience, but judging from the result, it should be usable.
However, the later versions of GIMP became less and less friendly to digital painters. The GPS mod has also discontinued after version 2.4. I had to look somewhere else. I eventually settled with Krita when I decided to leave Windows for Linux.