I was thinking that I wanted to add more content to my pieces and as I looked back through my old "Adobe" folder on my desktop I found an old piece of a gyroscope I did years ago in my free time. I knew I was going to put this in one of my pieces because I liked the shape and the revolving pieces so much, how they intertwined and flowed. But the complex shape reminded me of old alchemy circles, which I thought could be a great addition to my pieces, giving an ethereal and surreal presence to each work. I started researching them online and decided to make my own circles for each piece and add a few relevant traditional symbols to each one as well. For instance, my bird figure has an "air" symbol, the turtle has "sulfur" and "water", the snake has "iron" (for his sword), and the cat has a symbol for "boron" mostly because I took a liking to the symbol, and it resembles a cat's eye. One more piece is on the way, but I thought I'd get this up here

I think I've been stemming ideas from a lot of fantasy and sci-fi movies and video games for much of my work. I really do push to try and make my work look more towards a comic book or graphic pen approach. I like to have high contrast black and white images with partial grays in between, but its by no means a skill I've mastered in drawing yet. I also like to browse small time artist collectives such as Deviantart, they have great groups and categories for brainstorming and getting a good idea of what I might want my own pieces to look like. Below is a picture of one of my favorite Deviantartists, Prog Wang who does mech warriors, androids, and all kinds of futuristic stuff. I'm obviously not as advanced in technique as he, but I really enjoy his approach in creating from scratch and the constant build of colors he uses. I think DaVinci's concept drawings and sketchings are really more of what I relate to the most similarly because I enjoy the idea of trying to figure things out for the first time. He went out and studied things he didn't understand, that no one really understood at the time and went about trying to teach himself why and how things worked. I believe that if I can achieve a similar approach then people will start to see how my own creations would work. When doing his study drawings, he had a habit of drawing only portions of the body that interested him at the time or would refrain from drawing a mirrored half of the body such as doing only part of a ribcage, or one leg. I think I need to adopt something like this for my own work, partially completed pieces of my robots and possibly the rotation of joints or appendages to show their range of motion.

comic book effect I enjoy

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.

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.