robot | Eye Opening Design

A Boy and His Bot

“This is no place for the likes of you,” said the giant robot. His old gears creaking as he bent down.

“Come with me. For an adventure. I’ll not harm you.”

This was a fun one to draw. Started out as a pencil sketch. Was scanned into the computer, and colour loosely dropped in behind in Photoshop. The lines were then redrawn over top with a fairly gritty brush in Photoshop. I tried pretty hard to preserve as much of the original line as as I did that. I wanted to keep everything fairly loose. Adding in the texture to the robot was my favourite part.

I can’t take full credit for the design of the robot. In my son’s Kindergarten class, the had an in class assignment to build their own robot to teach them about different shapes. This monstrosity was all my son’s doing. I just added a few details.

Enjoy!

Robot Girl

During the summer of 2018, there was a hashtag on Instagram called #drawthisinyourownstyle and I wanted to participate. This was NOT my original design, just my interpretation of someone else’s work. In fact, this isn’t even the image I originally posted. I felt the symmetry need some work. This is the final result. About 90% of the work was done on my iPad. Just a basic pencil rough by hand and a bit of Photoshop cleanup afterwards makes up the other 10%. You can see what I had originally posted to Instagram here.

Enjoy.

Kid Robot

Fun sci-fi robot. The point of this one was to use a limited colour palette. I went with red, white, brown and black. Traditional inks with digital colour.

Enjoy!

World Art Drop Day 2015

After a long hiatus this summer, this is my first real blog post in a while. But summer is pretty much over, and I am ready to start things up again. So here we go!

This past week, I patricipated in World Art Drop Day, where artists all over the world left little gifts for people to find. Just check out out the hashtag #ArtDropDay in Twitter, Instagram and most likely Facebook. Or you can go to this page where it all started.

Last year, I drew out a series of artist sketch cards and hid them in various locations while taking my son to his daycare. This meant a lot of outdoor locations. And a torrential rainstorm. Read about it here. This year I wanted something a little more durable.

I fist started out with the idea of vinyl stickers. And while I did find Some nice places online, it was just too much money for just a few stickers I would need. It’s not like I was plastering the entire city with stickers!

I decided to 3D print a figurine instead. I had already settled on a theme of robots and it seemed like a natural. I hadn’t printed out anything of my own in 3D for a while so it was a good exercise to do.

I originally started out with a sketch. I sketched out quite a few different robots until I settled upon the design of the pillbot.

Once I had a sketch done, I used my iPad and a program from Autodesk called 123D Design to build most of the parts.

Once I had all the main pieces put together, I put everything into a 3D program called Blender. Here I could fine tune some shapes and get him posed.

Once I had the little robot posed, I output an STL file and sent him off to be 3D printed at the nice folks at Shapeways. He is printed out on a very fine detailed translucent plastic. I then quickly gave him a very thin coat of primer to help bring out the details.

If I were to do it again, I would have attached the arms to the base for some added reinforcement. While it printed out just fine, one of the arms did break off and I had to glue it back on. Hopefully the people who found the figurines found them fully intact.

Thoses of you who are interested, these little guys are now for sale online at Shapeways. I have the same robot in a few other poses and I may make them available if there is any interest in these little robots. Follow this link to purchase.

Just be aware these robots would not make very good toys for very young children. They are very small and fragile. The would be okay for a much older child (like a pre-teen or teen) or the young at heart.

Enjoy!

A Stainless Steel Rat Finally Rusts Away…

I found out the other day that one of my favourite childhood authors, Harry Harrison, passed away. You can read more about it on Neil Gaiman’s blog post about him.

As a young teenager I discovered him, like most of my early reading favourites, at the Science Fiction/Fantasy section of the Coles Books in Unicity Shopping Mall, where I spent many an hour sweating out what book I was going to buy next with my meager childhood earnings.

Harrison was most famous for his Stainless Steel Rat series of books. Crime capers set in the far, far future and narrated by the main character, Slippery Jim diGriz. It basically followed the old idea of using a crook to catch a crook. Lots of zanny fun. Anyone familiar with the cable TV shows White Collar and Burn Notice would probably like the series. A must for any budding deviant young mind to take in. I remember the covers of the books featuring a small mechanical rat on them. While the books really had noting to do with mechanical rodents (the stainless steel rat referred to the type of criminal Slippery Jim fancied himself as) I remember being fascinated with the design of the robots. Attached is my very quick homage to the series of books and to the author who gave me so many enjoyable hours of entertainment. Enjoy.

Sticker Craziness!

Just to see what would happen, I entered these stickers into a contest. I think the contest might be a bit more “street” oriented than what I would normally go for (I’m considered rather whitebread in Mr Rodger’s Neighbourhood, so judge yourself accordingly) but I was curious as to what I could do with the subject matter. It was basically a black and white, 3″ x 3″ ticket. And hopefully a tie-in with the artist who was co-sponsoring the event. Seems pretty simple. I guess I will find out after the 1st of April, when the contest closes.

The dinosaur was a bit of a stretch for me (unusual since dinos were my first love) but the robot turned out pretty sweet. I may have to use the design in another piece sometime. As for the panic dude, I had drawn something similar to him once before. I think this new version I did turned out better than previous attempts. Probably because it is truer to myself in terms of drawing style than the art style I was attempting to emulate.