We Could Build A Better Robot, If We Only Had Arms

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Here's the original sketch, and the outline, and the pre-Photoshop coloring.

Crabwalk

SketchBlog returns! I can't believe it's been over a month since the last post. As some of you know, I've been extremely busy with other projects, but I finally had time for some drawing tonight, and I think I'll be posting on a regular basis again now. So here's a new wallpaper for you:

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Right-click to save:
Wallpaper for standard (4x3) monitors
Wallpaper for widescreen (16x9) monitors

Oh, and if you hadn't noticed, there's now a pack of iPhone wallpapers on the wallpaper page (they're sized for the iPhone, but they'll work in other phones).

I'll post new artwork soon! In the meantime, if you're bored, you can enjoy some pictures I took of cheap/awesome alien tourist attractions during a recent stop in Roswell, New Mexico - click the photo for the full gallery:

Leaving Town

Usually when I draw something I have a very specific idea in mind from the beginning. Sometimes, though, I just start doodling and see what happens, and that's where, many hours later, this came from.

There's quite a bit of detail in it, so please, click to enlarge:



This is available as a print.

Detail

Initial sketch

Oh, and here are a couple pretty cool robots that came out while I was sketching.

Watching You Watching Me

The other day I was walking to the grocery store around the corner from my apartment, and I noticed that one of the trees was watching me. I've walked past this tree probably two hundred times, and somehow I never noticed that it had all these creepy eyes all over it. It's a pretty fantastic tree:




It even has a creepy face.

Anyway, the tree inspired me, so I decided to draw it, with lots of outlines so I could really put my new Cintiq tablet to the test. The large, expensive Cintiqs are gorgeous (like an Apple Cinema Display that you can draw on), but the advantage of the smaller one is that you can put it in your lap and relax and draw on it like a sketchbook, turning it and tilting it as desired. So I drew a lot of lines, here and there over the past few days, and I ended up with this:

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By the time I was done with all those lines I didn't particularly feel like coloring the thing in, and I kind of liked it black and white anyway. But it does sort of feel like a page from a coloring book, so I thought maybe someone else might want to color it in. If you happen to feel like coloring, here is a large version you can play with - and do please email me the results, or post them in the comments.

When I was a little kid the local grocery store used to have occasional coloring contests on their brown paper grocery bags. A picture of a turkey at Thanksgiving, or pumpkins at Halloween, that sort of thing. It always annoyed me because with brown as a base color, none of my brilliant Crayolas came out the way they were intended. But I did it anyway, and one time I won five dollars, and it was immensely exciting. This will sort of be like that, except you'll have a nice white base color, and no one is going to win five dollars.

P.S. In case you don't know, a nice way to color a flat image like this is to set it as a multiply layer in Photoshop and then do the color on a layer underneath it.

New Toys, Monsters

Among other things, I got a really nice set of Letraset markers for Christmas from Tam, a noble effort to get me off of my computer occasionally and maybe draw things on real paper. Go figure, my first instinct was to make some textures with the markers and scan them into the computer.

Then I got myself a Christmas present, the drool-worthy Cintiq pen tablet with LCD display. If you're serious about digital art or photography, you need a Wacom pen tablet - you just can't get any kind of results using a mouse. My lovely Intuos3 served me well for quite a while, but I'd always been eyeing the deluxe Cintiq line, which adds an LCD display into the tablet, so you actually draw directly onto your image! With the new 12wx making Cintiq tablets more portable and affordable, I finally had an excuse to dive in. To break in my new toy, I did a quick sketch today, drawing the outlines on my tablet and then coloring them in with some texture I made with the Letraset markers:

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This was a spiritual successor to a little doodle I did on the airplane the other day with the markers:

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I'm looking forward to spending some serious quality time with my new toys - the results, of course, will be showing up here.

Helicopt-O-Bot

I haven't had time to do any sketches lately, mostly because I've been busy trying to fulfill all the print orders. Is that irony? I'm not sure. Anyway, here's one I did tonight - I ended up with two versions, and I can't decide which one I like better, so I'm posting both. I also made a wallpaper version.

Version 1 - click to enlarge:




Version 2 - click to enlarge:



Here is the original sketch, which has Helicopt-O-Bot looking a bit too robotic. I changed him to look more like something an inventive child could put together out of items from around the house and believe it really works.

Hyperion Holiday

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This one was definitely the result of seeing this classic poster, which I have in my kitchen, and then somewhat subconsciously thinking about the cool look of Disneyland's great retro Tomorrowland travel posters, and probably also this scene from Forbidden Planet, and very possibly the desert-like alien terrain often depicted in Spaceman Spiff Calvin & Hobbes strips.

Robot Block Party

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YesterdayCube

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The look of this was inspired by an old metal sign I have - which is also where I got the overlay texture. It's an "Emergency Resuscitation" sign from the '70's - I found it in a ratty old spring factory somewhere in London.

The image itself came from how much I like the word "YesterdayCube," which popped into my head randomly yesterday.