How to Draw Robots

Robots have been filling out Christmas stockings since Santa made his first ride, so as the festive season draws near lets connect the circuits and open the lid on the mechanics of drawing our metal friends. And who better to lay down the nuts and bolts than robot supremo Mike Brownlow. Don't touch that dial!



I love robots. Robots have figured prominently in science fiction for a long time, and were a vivid part of my childhood.

I had robot toys and read robot comics. 

Films like The Day the Earth Stood Still, West World, Metropolis and Forbidden Planet all left their mark on me. 

So it’s little wonder that I’ve drawn and painted loads of the things over the years, little and large. 

 
When I came up with the idea for Little Robots back in the late ‘90s, it was partly because robots had never, to my knowledge, been featured as the heroes of children’s picture books, let alone a TV series. I felt as though I had a blank canvas to play with. 

The robots I finally decided on were a mixed bunch – short and tall, round and skinny, loud and shy, fast and slow. 

And that’s the joy of it. Robots, frankly, can be anything you want them to be – as complicated as the Terminator, or as simple as Tiny. 

If you take the simple approach, they can be easy to draw because you need only work with the most basic of shapes. Bodies can be boxes. Arms and legs don’t have to be complicated things with joints and muscles, they can be metal tubes, like those of Bender in Futurama. Robots can have two legs or three or more; they can have wheels or tracks or jets to fly with. Their hands can be simple pincers or suckers like those of the Daleks. Their faces need consist of nothing more than circles, triangles and rectangles. Stick a few rivets on the body and you’re done.

But if you want to try something more complicated, I’ll point out a few problems I remember encountering when I was drawing my characters in Little Robots. They might serve as handy do's and don'ts. I wanted them to look properly 3-dimensional and work from all angles, partly because I had a secret hope that one day they’d make it to the TV screen as animated characters. I also wanted a grungy, mechanical look to my robots, as if they’d ‘grown’ out of a junkyard, or been re-discovered in a Victorian inventor’s old laboratory, rather than having a shiny, hi-tech appearance, so these are some of the things I thought about…

• Faces. If you’re dealing with small children you’ll have to invest your robot with some personality. Immobile and expressionless robot faces like those of the Cybermen (for me, always far scarier than the Daleks!), are really creepy. Logically, robot faces won’t naturally have any mobility, as they’ll be made of metal, so you’ll have to cheat like crazy to enable them to show emotion. I tried to think of a robot face as being made up of cogs, hinges and widgets that moved about in a mechanical way. It was easier to imagine them being animated that way. Alternatively, I’ve created robot faces made from a TV screen before now, so that a variety of expressions could be shown in a plausible way.

• Think of other mechanical devices that might be used on your robot to emphasis its metallic nature – TV dishes instead of ears; telescopes for eyes; springs and shock absorbers for the arms and legs; rivets and screws; pressure gauges and flashing lights.

• Creating your robot’s world. A good exercise is to go into a typical garden shed, DIY  toolbox or an ordinary kitchen for that matter, look at all the gadgets you can see and, (with the appropriate permission!) try assembling some of the objects into a mechanical creature.
Similarly, if you want to create an unusual, mechanistic environment, try taking old pots, pans, cans, perfume bottles, widgets and doo-hickys from your cupboards, and assemble them into something resembling a townscape.  Turn some of the bits and bobs upside down or sideways, and you’ll find unusual shapes reveal themselves. Draw the shapes and embellish them until they become your own robo-town.

Reclamation yards and antiques fairs are other wonderful places to come across strange and unconsidered objects. Victorian mangles, old hoovers, spare parts from 1950’s cars, sci-fi memorabilia – there’s a world of inspiration waiting there for you!

• I wanted to give my robots a variety of finishes to make each stand out from the other so, for example, some had a shiny appearance, some had a rusty look. As an experiment, try drawing a rusty piece of metal, then a reflective piece of metal like a car bonnet. It’s a tough visual problem but you’ll learn a lot about observation. 

• At some point you’ll have to decide how your robot is going to move around. Some sort of logic, however warped, has to be applied, so if your robot has arms that hinge, try to consider the nature of the joints and whether they appear practical. What powers the limbs? How do they twist and turn? Consider the movement of the jaw, and the flex of the foot, and the way your robot collects information from the world. The best characters have a back story, and in this case that should include how they convincingly move through their world.

Finally, school visits. When I go into schools I’ll often do How-To-Draw sessions with the children, but I’ll also take various printed sheets, such as the two shown here, that can be photocopied for use in class after I’ve given my talks. 

 It’s an easy way for teachers to do follow-up work with the children. If they’re too young to do creative writing or drawing, many of them like to take these sheets and colour them in, cut them out and stick the bits together. I encourage them to use the sheets as a starting point, and to go on to make their own robots, which often results in some spectacular results! Why not try something similar?

Have fun!

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Mike Brownlow is both an illustrator and author of many books for children, including CBBC's Little Robots. His new book Ten Little Pirates  was illustrated by Simon Rickerty. Mike's clients include Orchard, Bloomsbury, OUP, Harper Collins, Pan Macmillan, Pearson, Lego....
Recently Mike was Words & Pictures' featured illustrator. He is an active member of SCBWI and lives in Somerset.

Featured Illustrator: Mike Brownlow

Mike Brownlow

This month's Featured Artist is Somerset based Mike Brownlow. From 'Lesser Known Deities' - check out Calvin, the Norse God of Underwear  -  to classic fairy tales, go to the  Featured Illustrator Gallery to see the full range of Mike's fun-filled graphic work!

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This is a piece of artwork from an on-going project called ‘Colin the Caveman.’Digital.


Personal Path

Two of the biggest influences on me as a child were Alfred Bestall’s version of Rupert the Bear…

… and Walt Disney. I was captivated by the classic Disney animations, and cinema-going in general has been one of the most formative experiences of my life. (Here’s where I confess to a shocking heresy. If push comes to shove, I actually prefer films to books. There, I’ve said it. Have a quick sniff of the smelling salts and we’ll carry on.) Later, I discovered DC Comics, Weird Tales and Marvel Comics, which were thrillingly different to British comics.

My academic career went something like this: all boys Grammar school; Foundation course at Liverpool Art College, (where there were girls and stuff! Oh, and some excellent teaching of the traditional skills of drawing and painting. And girls and stuff!); Graphic Design Degree at Central St Martins, then released into society, blinking and rubbing my little eyes.

I also worked on many an ad that tried to flog heavily sugared breakfast cereals to innocent young children. Sorry about that.

I fell in with a disreputable bunch of animators and illustrators, and shared two studios in London and many happy moments with them. (If you want to see a mind-expanding blog, go to ellisnadler.blogspot.com. Ellis is an old friend from the studio days, and crazed artistic genius.) This led to me working with many animators, mainly as a background painter and designer, including projects for Terry Gilliam, Bob Godfrey, Gerald Scarfe, Pink Floyd, and Mike Oldfield. I also worked on many an ad that tried to flog heavily sugared breakfast cereals to innocent young children. Sorry about that.

Background painting for Kellog's cereal ad. Airbrush.

I worked for magazines, ad agencies and design companies, illustrating film posters, (The Airplane Movies and their spin-offs,) book jackets, magazines, (Time Out, Radio Times,) and campaigns for the likes of Marks and Spencer, British Gas, Boots and Asda. But I really hankered after writing and illustrating my own work.

By this time I was living with my family in Somerset, and met the remarkable Henrietta Stickland of Ragged Bears Books, who lived quite close to me. She liked a couple of ideas I showed her for picture books and I ended up doing six books with her. The second one was called ‘Little Robots’. It was spotted at Bologna by the production company Lego Media, and subsequently made into a stop-motion animated TV series, shown in Britain on BBC2 and CBeebies. 

There were 65 episodes made, and it sold all round the world. I did all of the character design, some of the pre-production design, and I also wrote several of the episodes, which I enjoyed a lot. 

Lenny Henry,  the voice of sporty robot.

Since then I’ve produced books for a wide range of publishers, including Bloomsbury, OUP, Simon and Schuster, Macmillan, Scholastic, Piccadilly Press, and this year, ‘Ten Little Pirates’ with Orchard Books. This is the first book I’ve written but not illustrated. A sequel will be out next year and two more books have been commissioned.

Ten Little Pirates Cover

Process

I tend to do lots of rough drawings in layout pads at the beginning of any particular job, until I’m happy with the characters and know they fit comfortably within the story.

Pirate Roughs

I use Studio Layout Pads at 50 gsm – lovely smooth paper that’s just thin enough to trace through. So if I do a semi-successful drawing and want to develop it, I rip it out and pop it under the next clean sheet, using the original as a guide.

I find it very important to have a period at the beginning of every project when I try to empty my mind and draw whatever my hand wants to. The aim is to surprise myself and produce interesting new shapes.

I used to do all my rough drawings using Col-Erase animators’ pencils. These come in many colours, and each pencil has an eraser. The animators I knew would use these. Typically they’d start roughing out using light colours like orange, then use a darker pencil to add a more definitive line. They were paid per drawing – a great incentive to become good, and to become quick. (This was pre-CGI!) 

Nowadays, I mainly use a Pentel Sharplet-2 with an ordinary 0.5 HB lead. I find it very important to have a period at the beginning of every project when I try to empty my mind and draw whatever my hand wants to. The aim is to surprise myself and produce interesting new shapes. This will then set the style for the rest of the project.

I’ve painted using all kinds of media, including coloured crayon…

Pink Robot

acrylics…

Mickey Moonbeam

and watercolour.

From the book 'I've Got Nits'.

These days, when I have a finished rough I’m happy with, I either draw a black line version, scan it into the computer and colour it up in Photoshop…

Hugo Rocket

 … or scan in the rough, turn down the opacity and use it as a template to lay down colours on top.

Highlights Cover of 2012

I like to use favourite Photoshop brushes and textures to roughen up the image.

Tips

• Be influenced by the best, but don’t copy slavishly.
• Try to find a distinctive style that you’re comfortable with and gives you pleasure. If you don’t enjoy the process of making your drawings and paintings, there’s something wrong.
• Experiment and challenge yourself to keep on developing. Tastes never stand still.
• Diversify. Markets and technology change constantly and you should be open to any ideas that broaden your ability to make money from your art.
• Teach. I regret I’ve not taught more. Many illustrators (Quentin Blake, Raymond Briggs etc.) have used teaching to keep themselves going financially, in what is an infuriatingly fickle business.
• Zig when the others zag. Better to be on the crest of a wave rather than in its wake. 
• Marry well, or contrive to inherit vast wealth. Some people can be lucky enough to make lots of money as an illustrator. But be warned: most of us don’t. 

Contact Mike
Email: mjgbrownlow@gmail.com
Agent:Caroline Walsh and Alice Williams at David Higham Assoc. Ltd. carolinewalsh@davidhigham.co.uk

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Go to the Featured Illustrator Gallery to see the full range of Mike's fun-filled work !