I draw a lot of robots. I wanted to do something looser and quicker for this challenge, and have been digging this little grey tonal book I’ve been playing with when I go out for drinks with friends. Interestingly, When I posed the question to a bunch of artists I was drinking with at Motor City Comic Con this past weekend, the majority of them said Robbie the Robot was their favorite robot. R2D2 gets no love these days…

That said, I think spending eternity with one’s soul being torn apart might be up there in the nightmare column.

Wow, how the time seems to fly these days. This last month has been incredibly busy, which put me way behind schedule on my challenge piece. But, I managed to sit down last night and spend some time on this.

It’s another pretty sketchy piece and as far as these little experiments go, it’s my least favorite so far. It could partially be because it’s less of an environment and more focused on the character. It’s also pretty generic, I admit. I might have to go back into it and ink it for fun, but right now, I have to get moving onto the next piece of artwork.

Thanks for looking!

JM

My jumping off point was Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.  Clearly, I covered a lot of subsequent distance.

I’ve dubbed the piece, Birth of the New Queen.  I started out making a number of doodles of eldritch abominations and Cthulhu sketches before landing on the final concept.  It’s basically a manifestation of some of the things I most enjoying drawing: monsters, tentacles, eyes, slippery stuff, etc.

It’s a digital piece done à la Photoshop. The gif below illustrates the major steps of my process. Sketch to line art, to values, to hues, and finally highlights.

I’m never fully satisfied with any finished piece— at some point I just have to walk away from it.  I can get a bit obsessive about my art and working digitally allows for endless possibilities.  I could spend another week reworking and overworking this image.  On many occasions, I have gone back and revisited old work to make tweaks or give it a major overhaul… I have come to call this process George-Lucasing my work.

Hi folks!

Better late than never, as they say. This month’s challenge was a tad difficult, even when it seemed tailored to my skills at drawing machinery and technology. It’s the fact that I draw science fiction so often that had me wondering how could I come up with something original amidst all the robots that usually plague my illustrations. Finally, after giving it some thought, I concluded that I’d give this mechanical creation a spin through its actions rather than its design. I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that robots are usually used by humans as tools to do all those things we would find hard or difficult to; or morally ambiguous. These machines are thus tasked with endeavors that might seem strange and, being devoid of any investment into them, they’d slowly complete them wondering why humans would go to such lenghts as to creating new life to trap existing ones in this particular case. I hope you enjoy it!

Nic.-

There is actually a sizable robot collection occupying our kitchen. And a growing collection of robot ornaments on our christmas tree.

Which is to say, we like robots.

I’ll probably be spending most of my challenges on pure character design, because that’s the most fun ever.

Plus, robots are a little harder for me to deal with, mostly because it’s a genre that I’m not as comfortable with. With that said, I decided to approach this more as a loose drawing, similar to my previous Cthulhu piece. I just wanted to keep it a little more loose and fun, work with shading a bit, and just have fun! I think I topped out at around three hours on this piece.

Hope you like it!

JM

Remembered too late last night that it was my turn to post a challenge.

Few things; not a huge robot fan, so it gets a little difficult to conceptualize one without a guiding brief.  Played around with a tank-robot and a saber-tooth tiger based robot before I got frustrated and whipped up the devil-bot above.  Decided it was kinda simple and dull on it’s own so I tarted it up with a bit of colour and managed to bury most of the drawing.

Next month’s Dungeoneering 101 is more to my natural inclinations, though. . . .

~R