[Personal] Clockwork Creatures I

I imagined small clockwork soldiers as in The Steadfast Tin Soldier or The Nutcracker, and specifically what creatures in their world would look like. (A lot of my worldbuilding efforts start with thinking about the creatures and life of the world, it helps me imagine evolutionary timelines, biomes and environmental conflicts of the world.)
This is a first sprint to develop a possible pattern/design/style guide to start from. The process starts with quantitative scribbling (going back and forth between pure imagination and visual research) and ends with defining a common platform of components (shapes and forms) from which it's possible to structure a large range of different but coherent silhouettes.
I also like to do early pilot sketches, to make sure the direction works out and to get an early and tangible visualisation of a possible end result.