jordangreywolf | [Art & Fallout Stuff] Jackie Frost and Cry-O-Flo

"Jackie Frost" Mascot for Cry-O-Flo Coolant
I've toyed with making up some fictitious company names and logos to use for wasteland signage and the occasional billboard for Fallout-inspired tabletop terrain. The general vibe is that of 1950s-to-early-1960s aesthetics, with a dash of atomic-age/space-age futurism as if it were a real thing. (It's a little more complicated than that, especially over the course of the entire Fallout franchise, but that's my best attempt at getting a grasp of it. I'm mildly annoyed when I see otherwise impressive fan projects to add on material to the various Fallout games that drop 1970s muscle cars or 1980s big rigs into the landscape. "Gee, it's all stuff from the past, so it ALL works!" But it's not like the games themselves were always entirely consistent.)

The retro-FUTURISM thing is a challenge sometimes. It's not enough to just put a 1950s tanker rig on the table and call it a day. If at all possible, I want the "futurism" angle in there somehow. Plus, in the Fallout universe, gas was a super-rare commodity, leading to the Resource Wars, and rapid development of microfusion technologies. By the time the bombs dropped in 2076 (October 23rd!) in the Fallout timeline, just any vehicle you'd see out on the streets or in someone's driveway was fusion-powered. You can tell, because parking lot or a traffic jam is a very bad place to have a firefight. One of those cars catches fire, and a while later ... KAFWOOM! MUSHROOM CLOUD! CHAIN REACTION! AIEEEEE! Because apparently fusion reactors left neglected for 200 years are effectively micro-nuclear bombs just waiting to get set off if you hit them hard enough or burn them -- SCIENCE!

So, if the cars are all fusion-powered, why would you need a gas tanker? And I got one at a discount at my local craft store.

I really love the look of this one: apparently it's a real circa-1950s tanker truck, but an odd enough design that to my mind I could see it as a "retro-futuristic" truck instead of merely old.

Well, given the problem with the gasoline and oil, it must be carrying some OTHER liquid in bulk. So what could it be? I came up with an idea of some sort of "space-age" coolant. And, to add a little extra FI to my SCI, I handwaved it into being something like a liquid equivalent of the "OLEDs" I've read about (and am not sure if they actually exist) that supposedly convert HEAT into LIGHT -- and therefore, when they operate, actually cool the surrounding area rather than heating it. If that's true, I really ought to be seeing those things everywhere, right? But even if it's just garbage I read on the internet, and I'm being taken for a ride, it was inspiration enough for some sci-fi weirdness. So, let's call this a "thermal conversion fluid" that somehow converts heat into light, but slowly deteriorates in the process (so you'll need more of it, by the tanker).

I might fix up a tanker scene with a spill of some fluorescent-looking blue fluid and a few scattered "ice crystals" rising from the mess. In theory, eventually it should dissipate, and it'll happen a lot faster if someone hits the stuff with a flamethrower or some-such, but in the meantime you want to stay clear if you value your extremities.

So, I worked up a logo for this fictitious brand. The typeface is "Mrs Sheppards" from Sudtipos Foundry in Buenos Aires. The "Jackie Frost" mascot is meant to look a bit 1950s-pin-up-ish. (No fairy wings, though. I'm not sure if Jack Frost would normally have WINGS. In any case, I didn't want it to look TOO much like just a blue Tinkerbell.)

I'm also working on another retro-ish doodle of a mascot that looks like an anthropomorphic leafy plant (more cartoony, not pin-up-esque) for some sort of super-duper-high-tech liquid fertilizer that OF COURSE after taking in a bunch of radiation over 200+ years in the wasteland now has transformed into some horrific toxic waste that spawns mobile carnivorous plant-monsters in its vicinity. I don't know how I can handle BOTH with the same model (perhaps a "sleeve" I put on the tanker with the logo attached?), but I like to have options. If it turns out well, I might share the designs, to scale, with a PDF for anyone else who wants to attempt a similar conversion of the same model.

[Art & Fallout Stuff] Jackie Frost and Cry-O-Flo

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