Back To Robots

So, it's been a while since my last proper robot picture. That was done in mid-November for the Christmas card project. I'm used to doing a lot of my drawing in lectures, but Merry and Beth weren't too fond of me doing that, so there weren't any robots in December.

This time around I didn't struggle for ideas at all. There's so much going on in the world at the moment, so it felt good to try and channel some of my feelings towards that into this picture. You probably can't see much so far, but I'm doing a scene of robot protesters. The recent protests have been a beam of light in the bleakness, so I guess this is my way of saying I'm so proud of everyone who's keeping up at the moment.

The Archive of Archive - A Tale Of Two Cities & The Road To Nowhere

One of my more unusual traits as an artist is my tendency to go back to previous pictures and work on them some more. I used to do this quite a lot, as many of my original drawings were done in pencil but as they grew older and began to fade I went over them in pen to preserve them. Sometimes I would later come back and add extra details, or shading, or even just fixing some line widths. I keep very few pictures sacred. I fell out of this habit for a while, as I was generally happy enough with my pictures that I never felt the need to tinker with them more.

Recently I began doing this again but in a different manner. Rather than simply enhancing the original to create a better version of the same picture, I've been using digital techniques to add completely new purpose to existing art. Before the EPY began I did the biggest case of this so far. I drew a picture of a robot highlander at the start of last year, and whilst I really liked it, it didn't have a lot of potential as a picture to sell because it was kinda scary, and I ran out of paper before I got to its feet.

I had wanted to do a hillwalking robot for a long time, and with Langwathby Art Mart incoming, I decided that I would do a full retool of the highlander picture. Using my lightbox, I drew a new head, legs, walking stick, and backpack for the robot. I also removed the shoulder cranes and the original parts. Finally I added a detailed background to complete the effect. It now stands as one of my best pictures to date. I'm very happy with it.

This is a technique which really captures the way I work. I enjoy digging up elements from my past to use as inspiration, especially in my art. I like that it shows that I've been having good ideas for a long time, but just not the talent to put them to use effectively.

The next picture I used this for was another attempt to freshen up my portfolio for prints. I have a solid collection of A4 and A3 pictures, as well as a gigantic A1 print, but in the A2 size I feel a little underrepresented. The only one I have is beginning to show its age, and looks a little out of place on its own. The Road To Nowhere filled that category, but I wanted another to properly have representation at that size, especially now I'm thinking of phasing out my A4 collection. So I took one of those A4 pictures and built a new picture around it.

That picture was Christina, one of the citybot pictures. She was always an awkward bot in the family, simply due to being drawn far smaller than the others. I examined her pose and worked out that she would work well as pleasantly surprised. Rather than retooling parts of her, I added a second 'bot presenting her with flowers, along with a detailed background. I tried to showcase the scale of the 'bots here, as that was one of the faults of the original Christina picture.

A am happy with the finished picture but I feel that it only works at a large size. The background to picture ratio is a bit too far off but generally I'm fine with it. It still makes an excellent addition to the A2 print collection.

The Archive of Archive - Music Shop

One of the places I visited during my card selling phase was a music shop across from where I work. They're quite a popular spot and I had seen them selling cards before so I payed them a visit. They liked my work but just wanted music-related cards which, y'know, makes a lot of sense. They also agreed to take on some prints. All of this would have been great had I not only got one music-based picture. And I didn't even like the one I had.

I had been considering doing a new guitar robot for a while so I saw this as the perfect opportunity to make an updated one. I shifted the focus to a more low-key setting and swapped the electric guitar out for an acoustic one to add some differences to the first guitar picture.

The main difference here is in the robot design itself. Whilst my first one was a very basic robot design, I wanted to push things a bit more in that regard. I also wanted to do another female robot. Although my 'standard' design is fairly androgynous, a lot of the other designs I use tend to have a much more male physicality to them. With this and the next picture I did I wanted to try and offset this (and it's something I'll strive to do a lot more from here on out in my art). I wanted to go for a 'hipster' aesthetic for the robot here, so I gave her some dreads with an undercut alongside trying to factor in some more subtle cues in the robot detailing. I then capped off the deign with a pair of big boots, because I love drawing robots in shoes for some reason.

I gave the picture a full background as well, which is something I have been doing more often in my artwork recently. I went for a backstreet city setting, which gave me the chance to draw some slightly different stuff.

The Archive of Archive - Cumbria

One of the biggest factors that has determined the progress of August has been me living in Cumbria. Due to situations not entirely going in my favour, I ended up staying back home for the first month of the project. During the welcome week I had laid the groundwork of things to be doing for the time ahead, as well as sorting out communication with Beth and Merry.

Things did turn out a little differently to how I expected though. Work at home was far more intense than I'd expected, with the summer workload proving a lot to deal with. I worked in a school uniform shop, so this is by far the busiest time of year for them. Trying to get work done after a day of that was proving more difficult than expected.

The next minor issue came from the fact that the three members of the group were somewhat fragmented. Merry was keen to wait for Beth before commencing work on the Captive North project, so the first few weeks for archive were filled in mostly with web designing work. With my position in Cumbria proving less useful in this regard, I began to focus my time towards other directions.

One of my more popular outputs is my robot artwork. It's what most people know me for. Over the last few years I've flirted with ways of monetizing my art, and usually settled for prints, which I've sold at art fairs and in local cafes and shops to a decent degree of success. So with this extra inclination to be doing enterprising work, I decided to branch out a little and produced a series of greeting cards with my artwork on. Thanks to my artwork being black-and-white, I managed to get them printed really cheaply, and in the following week tracked down envelopes and plastic sleeves at good prices too.

I've had some mixed successes so far with the cards. I've sold some alongside my latest couple of exhibitions, and also sold small numbers to local businesses as well as some further afield in the Lake District. But most importantly I've sold a batch to a local Hallmark branch. Out of all of these, this stands the strongest chance of bringing in more work, especially if they pass the word along. I just have to hope they sell now.

It hasn't been a perfect road though. I have to admit that production ended up being fairly rushed and as such didn't have the chance to do as much picture editing as I would have liked, resulting in a few cards where the artwork doesn't fill the space as well as I would like. I also made an assumption that the regular size of cards would be A5, rather than the actual slightly smaller size they are, resulting in some customers reporting poor sales due to them not fitting in card racks.

If I progress this venture beyond the current batch of stock, I would like to spend a bit more time progressing the cards before I print them. I would like to add some hand-drawn typography to them, as well as fixing the designs. Time-permitting, I would also like to do some more card-appropriate cards, with birthday and Christmas themes. I'm proud of the progress I've made, and it's been an interesting chance to dip my toes into unknown territory, but it's also shown me a lot about where I need to go from here to enjoy more than a modest success.

The Archive of Archive - Animated Logo

One of the first thing we discussed as a group was that we wanted an animated version of our logo to put in our work. As I had an idea about what I wanted from it, I got the job of building it. I was slightly inspired by mechanical gubbins and of parts moving into place. I wanted a slightly mechanical feel to it. So I sat down in After Effects and came up with this.


In the long run I'd like to add some shadows to it (and possibly the logo itself), and I feel it would benefit from some sound effects, but I'm really happy with how this looks.

The Archive of Archive - Motion Graphics Showreel

For Merry's interview, we decided we wanted to have a group showreel to demonstrate our skills. Sadly we didn't have on yet. So one night after the session in the Doyyec, I put one together. It was fairly similar to many of my other showreels in that it employed fast electronic music, but it ended up being a lot harder to put together because I had to put in a balanced amount of everyone's work. It also suffered a little due to time constraints and a slight lack of communication. Merry would have liked some slightly different clips in, and the font I had chosen wasn't reinstalled when Beth fixed the scaling issues, but I'm happy enough with the general effect. Also we've been having some trouble with the Archive Vimeo page but soon we'll have everything moved over.

The Archive of Archive - Welcome Week Part 2 - Archive Business

As well as the planned welcome week activities, Archive got up to a lot of other stuff along the way. One of the main events was an interview with multimedia video company Captive North, The original plan was for Merry and I to attend the interview together, but the enterprise team decided it would be better if only one of us were to go. So Merry headed off without me and I held the fort back in Huddersfield.

Thankfully I have been led to believe that the interview went rather well, and we got a test job. Sadly this was an unpaid one, but it's for a charity, so presumably they won't be making any money out of it either. So that's okay. By the end of the week we had begun to throw together a handful of ideas for the project, and scanned the leaflet it was to be based on so that we all had a copy.

The other big piece of news was a paid design brief from Marcus, another student from the centre. He wanted a 3 part animation series with 30 seconds in each clip. So we had that too and that was pretty cool. He had worked with Ink before, so we also knew what he was looking for from them. All in all, things were going well.

Additionally over the week, we did a few other jobs. We began looking into website designs, finalised our logo, animated said logo, and made a new showreel. We also did a whole bunch of planning and looking into prices. sadly we lost Beth halfway through the week but Merry and I continued doing planning, and got plenty of stuff done.

The Archive of Archive - Welcome Week Part 1 - Scheduled Content

As a latecomer to the enterprise scheme, I was a little nervous about welcome week. Would everyone be super-duper neat and polished businesspeople with years of experience behind their backs? Would everyone be wearing suits? Would there be lunch provided? Lots of scary questions. But in the end it turned out fairly nicely. Rather than breaking down the week chronologically, I'll instead talk about the distinct sections. It's easier to remember and record things that way.

The biggest chunk of the scheduled week was spent with the instructors discussing how the year would work. It was broken into a series of shorter talks (assumedly because most of the chairs in the corner were pretty uncomfortable) about the various elements of the scheme. Whilst filled with useful information about the year and beyond, there's not a whole heap to report on here as everyone's experience would be the same pretty much, except perhaps the lucky people who got the comfy seats.

A couple of these talks featured guest speakers from previous EPY businesses. These were seriously useful and gave a proper insight into what would be coming, in a slightly more informal and memorable manner. They discussed scary topics like the fragility of partnerships but also talked about sillier things like making strange flavours of vodka. It was a lot of fun. Afterwards we also got the chance to talk with Ink, another graphic design and animation company from last year, who offered us a huge heap of incredibly useful advice. Like seriously, thanks guys. You're the best. 

Plus we got to try a little bit of the fancy alcohol.

In the slightly more unusual end of things, we did a visit to a local pipe-cleaner factory. The only one in Britain apparently. Admittedly not what I was expecting to be doing this week. On the plus side, the factory was a fairly interesting place. Sadly we didn't learn a huge amount from the talking that happened along the way as we were all wearing earplugs. It was hard to make things out. After the tour we were told all about the many uses of pipecleaners, and continued the week's unofficial theme of businesses evolving over time. It was interesting. But perhaps the most interesting stuff was to be found by just looking around the factory. It was full of interesting stuff. In particular the martial arts classes upstairs were an unusual thing for a factory to have. But the most memorable part of the entire trip was seeing the board of people who had worked at the factory for 'forty years of unbroken service' to the factory. That stirred up a lot of strange feelings in me. It's both heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. I didn't even know that was possible.

A couple of days later, Mr. Pipecleaner returned for a mini-project where we had to come up with new uses for pipecleaners. It was...interesting. As an idea presentation session it hit all the right notes. Everyone worked hard and the presentations were well arranged and strong. But my main problem lay with the pipecleaners themselves. Despite a few cool ideas, the brief just felt like it was dead before it arrived. Pipecleaners are just too limiting. Almost every winning idea could be summed up as 'cleaning something different'. Admittedly it's hard to come up with extra uses for pipecleaners (so massive kudos to Team Sex Toy in that regard), but I feel the more unusual ideas should have had more credit than simply 'clean some things'. 

Preceding that was a pair of workshops about organisation and creativity. The former was the better of the two, and whilst it flirted with many ideas I'd come across before, it managed to throw a couple of brand new ones into the mixing pot that I'd never heard of before. I'll definetely be using some of those in the years to come. Following that was the far weaker creativity one. Admittedly creativity is a hard topic to work around but I don't feel it managed to explore very much useful stuff at all. The main positives to be gleaned were the 'everyone can be creative' beats from the beginning as that's an important one to remember, as well as a couple of brief points about idea generation before the workshop wandered off elsewhere.

As for the rest, we had a few smaller exercises mostly based around getting to know one another. Pretty simple stuff but incredibly useful at the same time.

To wrap up the scheduled welcome week discussion, I have to say I did enjoy it. It was certainly an information-heavy affair, but that's hard to avoid. My main advice for next week would be to spread it over three days and have slightly longer days with a couple of the less useful workshops cut out. I feel by the end of the week most of us just wanted to get on with it. But all in all, rather good.

Designed By Archive

For the first half of the 2016-2017 university year, I have been creating work on my placement year as part of Designed By Archive, an animation company comprised of myself, Beth Brewster, and Merry Eady. We stuck at it for the first term, admittedly with some high points and low points, but we did alright. However, as the January term began, tensions began to rise within the group. I'd been doing a few projects on the side, and been enjoying those far more than Archive, and enjoyed the lack of restraint that comes from working by myself. Meanwhile Beth and Merry had found that their personalities and mine were clashing a bit too much for their tastes, and they wanted me to take a step back.

So for the time being I'm working for Archive for two days a week, and working for myself for the rest of the time. Depending on how things go, this'll probably change, but for now, this is how it works.

The next few posts will be excerpts from the original blog I set up for my time at Designed By Archive. After that will likely be some posts detailing the work I completed from the Designed By Archive blog. And from there on out, it'll probably be all about the work I'm doing by myself. See you on the other side!