I’ve been away far too long. This year has been such a dry spell for my creativity, especially drawing and doodling. Just staring at a blank page and not feeling any inspiration at all. But then I suddenly saw an interesting doodle on Pinterest of some robots I went straight to my sketchbook
I just filled the page with different robots of all styles. I have no idea what their different purposes are? I suppose they are designed for one thing, making them entirely useless for anything other than vacuuming the carpet.
I prefer using pencil to make my initial doodles. A mechanical pencil with a 0.7mm HB lead, anything less and I don’t get that creative flow. The Rotring pencils are amazing and they are built like tanks and last forever.
I took a copy of the sketch and blew it up to fit to the width of A4 Hot pressed watercolour paper and traced them on a light box with my broad nib fountain pen, going back across it with a fine nib marker for the inner details.
I initially drew the square format to fit the Instagram dimensions, but then decided to expand my robot collection to fit the A4 dimensions too. Quite pleased with the results.
For this smaller piece I used a small set of Inktense palettes. I also added the color late at night in front of the TV and my bedside light didn’t give me the best way to colour them, but the limited colourspace gives them a good metallic finish, if a little dull.
This second attempt uses Watercolour and I went a little too dark but still pleased with it. I might trying again with something more blue or even golden?
The next attempt might be to render it digitally in Procreate, but I seem to lose something in the pen strokes. I think it spends too much time stabilising them, so I might try and dial that down a lot.
Anyway, I will try and post more regularly from now on