Robots Under Pressure

It's been a slightly packed couple of weeks.  It was my Son's birthday yesterday, and that will be the focus of this post (completely skipping over two other things I need to blog about, not including the sketching posts I have still failed to get to). The day before I had an important presentation at work (I wasn't doing the presenting, but it was my work - along with others - being presented, if that makes sense), and that might eventually be the focus of a post in about 5 years time.  Anyway, those two things were a day apart, and I was given the task for each of them a day apart as well, about 2 and a half weeks ago.

For work it was that I'd taken a screenshot of something from just the right angle that it looked good, and it was suggested that it be shown off at this presentation. Except not a still shot from just that angle.  What I was working on was in no-way ready to be presented in that way, but I said sure anyway, and then set out to make sure it wasn't horrible.  It was more work than I'd anticipated, but such is life.  I can't go into any additional detail, except that getting it to a state I was (fairly) happy to show took late nights and last weekend. This is not a complaint - it's just something that goes along with the job sometimes.  On it's own, not a big deal.

The day after this came up my wife suggested I do something for my Son's birthday.  He's been on a kick to get a picture of a Cute Robot for a while, and she's been looking at pictures on Etsy and such.  I'm generally loath to buy something I could do just as well myself (which isn't much to be honest), so she said "well, why don't you do one...  Or more?"  We ended up deciding on 7. She said 4 to 6, and I pointed out that since he was turning 7 it should be 7.  You may note there are only 6 below - explanation to follow.

Click to enlarge images, as usual.

Anyway, I had no idea if I could even do them since it's not like I have a history of drawing cute Robots.  Clearly I could do it to a degree, you can see the results above, but 2 weeks ago I had no clue, so I got to sketching to find out.

I sketched in the evening for a couple of days, and came up with a bunch of robots of slightly varying styles.  Mostly I was going for the classic cute robot vibe of the 50's, but there's some slightly different stuff in there too.  They weren't drawn in as orderly a manner as this obviously - They're scattered around about 4 sketchbook pages in all sorts of orientations - I've just laid them out like this here for easy viewing.

I had one rule when sketching - I could look at all the robots and reference I wanted until I actually picked up a pencil, at which point other Robots were off the table for reference.  Everything else was fair game though - the Robot with the wings was based on a squirt bottle for example.  The animals in the lower right were from reference, and I drew them in order to have something else to place in an image if I needed to. Just as well I did as my wife wasn't keen on the wet tiger, so he got switched to a cute baby penguin instead.

That tiger pic may get done yet though - cats and Robots seems to be pretty common (as do robots with hearts and robots with balloons - these are all cliche stacked to the heavens), so I thought it would be funny if it was a tiger instead.  I mean what's a tiger going to do to a robot?  Behave more or less like a regular cat to a human is my guess.  I think it's sweet, so I may use the idea at some point in the future one way or another.  That Robot with the leash and umbrella is based on a Davy Lamp we have by the way.

After sketching I did a mockup of how the finals might look.  This was for two reasons; firstly I wanted to make sure the idea might actually work when done on toned paper, and secondly I wondered how difficult it would be to hack something together if it turned out I sucked at drawing them for real (did I not mention that - those are all physical, not digital pieces, except for this mockup).  Turned out okay, but I figured I'd have to do more work on them than this if I did them digitally.

My wife had picked out her nine favourites at this point, and had the list ordered.  I had a choice of ways to transfer them from sketches to final 8x10 images,  and eventually settled on scanning them, blowing up the size with a printer and then tracing that over to the final paper as a guide.  Other options were using a grid (pain in the arse to erase when finished), or just re-sketching at a larger scale (too much potential for mistakes, and thus wasting my nice toned paper).

Above is the one of the seven I didn't get to because on the last day before his birthday my son had a large tantrum and put me right off bothering with it.  I did tell him he can have another if he can be good for the rest of the week, so this one may eventually see charcoal.  You can see that in this case I did resketch parts of it (on sketch paper) because I wasn't terribly happy with his head.  I also swapped out the balloon for the butterfly since two balloon robots is overkill.  I then gave the other Robot this one's heart balloon.  These got printed on regular printer paper.  I flipped some of them - this was to make tracing easier in some cases, in others it was to actually flip the result when I inked it.

And here I am drawing one of them (I adjusted the contrast on the middle image so you could see the lines after tracing - they're practically invisible otherwise).  Pretty simple setup - Traced the printed blowup on tracing paper, taped the tracing paper to the toned paper, rubbed the graphite from the tracing paper onto the toned and then proceeded to ink it (with a sharpie fine liner, although I switched to a thicker marker for Robin just to mix things up a little).  I used two shades of grey and black Prismacolor markers for large areas of tone, and then white and black charoal for the shading, except for a white gel pen for the strongest highlights.   Colour was added using Prismacolor pencils, and the penguin was filled white with a white paint marker.

Other than the borders I didn't use a ruler for any of them - I'm quite pleased about that. Each one took between 90 minutes and two hours, so not an insignificant amount of time given what else was going on - and in addition to the work thing I slipped on some ice (no major damage, just aches), got (and have) some tinnitus in my right ear, my wife's car broke down, and we suffered another bereavement just as I was beginning (we were no longer close, but I had a great deal of respect for them back when we saw each other regularly).

The only downer with the actual art was the one with the two robots holding hands ("Heart")- My fixative spray for the charcoal decided to spit all over that one, and left a stain.  It's actually a cool effect - but I would have planned something for it if I'd known in advance...

And that's that.  Me and my wife framed them, and they're ready to go on his wall.

I don't usually do this, but if you want to see them larger (and in the unlikely event you want to order prints), you can see them over on my Deviant Art page with the following links:

Balloon
Penguin
Oil
Sunflower
Heart
Robin

So, what do you think?  Did I do an okay job on these retro bots? I would not rule out doing more in the future, but it isn't currently planned beyond the possible 7th for my son.   I'll update here if that one does happen I guess.