Tuesday, February 26, 2013

I haven't yet scanned my newest piece because I need to use one of the large scale copy machines with a larger scanning bed, but it is a representation of the famous Icarus of Greek mythology. In my own piece, Icarus is composed mainly of metallic wings and appendages and bursting through a sheet of glass while being slightly silhouetted by a large spherical sun directly behind him. The sun is meant to juxtapose the ancient myth since this robot's wings will not melt at a similar height. I have also tried to fashion the figure with a similar physique of strength and conditioning as Icarus is often displayed with to show the natural beauty of the form. This piece is meant to capture another step towards advanced technology as I present my creation with the adoption of flight instead of just pure agility and reflexes. I think that with a good amount of digital painting that this piece shows promise to be my favorite.

 With each piece I would like to try and highlight a certain ability or strength within my creation; for instance, my first robot demonstrates great speed, the next shows agility, and this one flight. For my next two or three I am considering brute strength for my next piece (albeit robots today tend to exhibit strength quite well so this will have to be exaggerated), but other than I am stumped on what I should do for my final one or two. I'm thinking enhanced sight or hearing would be neat but difficult to display, another option is some type of futuristic matter manipulation like telekinesis or pyrokineses. I don't know, I'm sure it will be pretty cool though.


Thursday, February 21, 2013

In this piece I wanted to demonstrate not only the physical prowess of my creations but also the light footed agility that they may possess someday as well. While it is rough at the moment, I will be trying to show my robot in an acrobatic feat of sliding through a field of lasers unharmed. Catherine Zeta Jones has got nothing on these animatrons.






Friday, February 15, 2013


Today we had a pretty nice critique that led me to really voice what I'd like to show in my body this semester. I would like to give off the impression that I am creating a journal or a collection of concept robots and inventions of the future, yet set in a rougher, more old fashioned period. The subjects should look rustic or pre modern in terms of current technology but set the scene for a similar age, even though the technology is far more advanced for the time period. For instance, this would be similar to looking at blueprints and concept sketches from 150 years ago but of technology that is not even available to us today. I will show my creations doing things we wouldn't think possible in terms of today's possibilities. I also want to bring a sense of fantasy to the viewer by placing the robots in crazy situations or surrounding them with unfamiliar or antique objects. I'd like to have the viewer think they were examining the lost pages of some unknown inventor from centuries ago, or that they were stumbling upon the musings of an engineer. The sense of fantasy is important to me because the things I will be presenting will be so odd and so unachievable by today's standards, yet shown in an exaggerated form.



Monday, February 11, 2013

Along with showing the design process of robots, one of the things I want to try and accomplish with this series is to show them with seemingly exaggerated technical prowess. To us this may seem like an impossible feat in any machine today, but it could possibly happen at some point. We have no idea what kind of advancements the future holds for us in the next century. We could have never have imagined what we have as our most modern conveniences today a century ago, let alone longer than that, so who knows what lays ahead. But I enjoy the dramatic, hopeful exaggeration because I want it to seem crazy at the time. Commoners would have thought Da Vinci to be crazy for trying to build flying machines during his time, and the case isn't too much different now.



Sunday, February 10, 2013

Scans of a couple of the drawings I've done for my base images. For whatever reason with the mode changing between grayscale and RGB 8b, they don't save color and levels properly, so they are a bit light












Thursday, February 7, 2013


I still need to work a bunch out on this, but I'm getting closer to what I want

Friday, February 1, 2013


I've started to scan my drawn portions of my work and begin adding digital layers. For my pieces I would like to give a presence of blueprinting and rough drafts in order to relate to the process of improvement and development. At this point, I may decide to exclude architecture all together altogether and just design robots and animatrons of different eras or concepts. What I think would be a cool thing to do at this point is keep a base image and develop it different every time I start a piece, sort of like a template. This way I could give the impression of expansion and tweaking over time as my ideas change. My robot may change angles, proportions, size, and general physical composure over its development process. 

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