Robots - Drawings and Sketches

This section deals with Robot sketches and doodles.  I have found that my most prolific doodle time was in the 80's and 90's at McDonnell Douglas Aircraft and Astronautics.  I was working at a place where there were all sorts of activity that was going on.  In our building we had aircraft and missiles, to the building on the right was spacecraft division and power supplies, to the left was Artificial Intelligence and smart skin development. Manufacturing, Simulation and Aircrew Training Bubbles were in the building behind us where you could walk through and see many things being constructed.  To the front of our building was the Phantom Works, the counterpart to the Skunk Works of Lockheed Martin.  My favorite time was spent in the Astronautics Technical Library pouring over all the manuals and documents that were available to me.  

First up is one of my favorite sketches, the Godling Robot. Just an idea I had that combined Sci-Fi and the concepts of a robot that thinks it is a god.  I have the simple idea sketch on the left side and the more developed on the right.  I find that my favorite paper is the brown textured notepad that you find in most of my sketches and doodles. I should do more with highlights and shadow to make the drawings pop. The upper right has a robot hand in a pose that I have sketched many times in different styles. I also experimented with different fonts and styles of lettering, so you will these every once and a while. I should collect these into it's own page.  The text "Notes of A MAD Robotist" was the gist of a idea for a series that would be published in our IPMS St. Louis Gateway Crazed Plastic. And yes, there would be articles on building plastic models involved in the articles. (Some have noted that there have been articles with no building, but I see these as references for the later building articles.)

Next up, arms, hands and heads. Ideas for different styles for form and function. Most would involve wire, metal and plastic construction.

The series of Japanese 'Marshy Dog' robots was the inspiration for doing a diorama with a field repair outfit. This would show the repair of one of the robots/robot armor suits in the field.  I have seen many great builds where this was accomplished in the Japanese Model magazines like Hobby Japan, B-Club, Model Arts, and others.

I do sketches and doodles to form ideas for the covers of Crazed Plastic Publication. The Robot Series was fun to play with and I ended up with a pretty good cover in the end. Further down on this page is the cover I came up for CP#22.

A Japanese animation called 'Laputa' was the inspiration for a kit and blueprint style drawing that I have been working on. Many other artists have already come out with their versions and they are all excellent. My sketches would include measurements and details.

Terminator robots are on the list as well and I toyed with the idea to detail several of the robot kits.  As I find my folders for the Terminator series, I will expand out this section of the page.  I did write to Stan Winston on some copies of the blueprints of the terminator and he responded, saying that they are still being used. This gave me info that there was other movies in the making.

In trying to find a unique font/type to apply to the title to the robot series of articles, I came up with some samples that I should have created the entire alphabet. I may still do this.

 

Still more mechanisms and arms, fingers, hands, etc.  You can never be short of these.

More ideas for title fonts.  I'm sure that if I look into the free font packages today I would find something that would be close to what I have here.  This was back in 1988 where there were few font packages for the computers. We had to draw our own if we wanted stylized fonts.

This is the final form that the Robot Cover for Crazed Plastic #22 became.  It is a drawing that I did with the Glaug Combat Tactical Pod of Macross World. I have it breaking through the front cover with a simple gray zip-a-tone background.  I did not want to show the inside pages as this would be too 'busy' to see the robot drawing. On the left leg of the robot I included my stylized initials and the date. Pretty nifty.  I have the original drawing of this somewhere. I will include it when I find the folder of the artwork.