Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Seven Year Sketch

It was late 1999 as I huddled in my secluded mountain compound, awaiting Y2K and drawing this sketch. It was intended as a Magic: The Gathering card, if you can believe that. I was only meant to draw an automaton, but I had this urge to put him in a tree. The Art Director rejected the concept, and I was sort of relieved. I liked this guy so much I wanted to do something with him myself.

I've tried to insert the poor little robot into a number of projects over the years without success. One such project was a poem. After a number of false starts I realized that the only thing in the poem that really wasn't working was the robot, so I took him out. The poem became my first book as both author and illustrator, Tree Ring Circus. Here's a detail from one of the paintings. Someday, little robot.

7 comments:

Ryan Wood said...

Great design & sketch! Bring on the robot stuck in a tree book, please.

mouseypapel said...

This is incredible , Its so rare to wrote you !!!!, congratulations!!!!
I follow part of your work long ago and enchants to me, I Have many cards of magic illustrated by you, I am your fan!!!
You are really a brilliant with a pen, the drawing of above is wonderful!!!!
It would be an honor if your you visited my blog of illustration and set me an impression or you answered this post!!!
many greetings from Chile!!!
Bye!

Shawn Escott said...

Wow! Great design for a robot. Very unique too. You could really use your imagination on a story for this one!

Joshua James said...

Howdy Mr. REx!

Just wanted to say I reallly appreciate what you are doing for fantasy art. You are one of the few guy's pushing costume design slightly into a more fresh look. Your compositions are fun and not stiff and your colors are great. Always looking forward to new work.

Hope that Arse Kissing didn't leave a mark ^ ^

-JtJ

Adam Rex said...

Some marks you don't want to wash off, JtJ. Thanks for the kind words.
And thank you also to Rodrigo Diaz, Shawn and, as always, Ryan. I hope I can worm him into some sort of story soon. That you all felt compelled to write makes me think there really might be something here.

Andy Murray said...

what a tragic fun story! It's frustrating wanting to do something and being denied it for years. Still, it's a great drawing, and I love how you make distinctively interesting work.

Andrea Bowman said...

Your work is so inspiring, and i love the sketch