Beautiful Robots

Okay, so this image has pretty much been in my head for about 10 years. The inspiration behind it (loathe as I am to admit it) are lyrics from the Girls Aloud Song "Untouchable". The lyrics read "And in my dreams it feels like we are 40 storeys tall" and "Like beautiful robots dancing alone". I always wondered how to represent this, how to make robots beautiful etc. and it just seemed like something I would never end up creating.

As you can see I tend to work more in monochrome pencils than colours as I think it requires more skill to create a piece from different intensities of the same medium. However, having purchased two sets of pencils from The Works I wanted to test the colours out. Sadly I was sorely disappointed; the pencils are extremely poor quality - the leads break constantly and it is almost impossible to layer/shade colours as their texture is overall pretty waxy.

Be that as it may I still enjoyed creating this piece. I always envisioned the robots against a magenta sky, and silhouette of skyscrapers. I wanted to create something intimate from inhuman subjects. The shape created by the two on the page resembles a heart. Even though the robots have no eyes, they clearly gaze into each other's faces. Hopefully you can feel the trust, anticipation and romance in their embrace. I usually create a piece from things that I can see and emulate, but this is pretty much a first for me - drawing something that only exists in my imagination (hence the artistic licence with things like shading). I know it is a poor workman who blames his tools, but I do genuinely feel as though I could have done a better job if I'd had better pencils where I could really spend the time shading/building layers of colour. The method I deployed to try to get around this was a sort of cross hatching effect, which can be seen most clearly in the sky. I liked that this also felt like a nod to the intention of intimacy behind the whole piece, as I was subtly embedding 'X's into the entire image. Another image that was great fun to run through Prisma as it was so colourful. It's great fun to watch

the time-lapse and see four hours work in 30 seconds!