Sustained Investigation #1

The inquiry question that will guide all four of the sustained investigation artworks is "What could the future relationship between man and machine look like". In media, there are a few different depictions of the future of technology and most of them are bad. I wanted to explore a wide range of futures for this project which is why I decided to start off with a good future, something not as common in media. Particularly I wanted to connect a command experience from today and connect it to what it could be like in the future. In this piece, the children had a snow day, something I remember fondly expressly from when I was younger. This piece also contained a friendly-looking robot carrying pine trees and wearing a Santa hat. Something that I was trying to figure out within the piece was giving each being a personality. The robot is friendly, delivering Christmas trees, smiling, and playing along with the children. The kid with the purple jacket is adventurous but still being safe by having a tight grip. The kid with the red scarf is more of a goofball, smiling while hanging off the robot. The kid in the flannel is the most social, trying to talk with the robot. None of them are afraid because I was trying to show how this is a normal part of life for these kids.  

This piece of artwork was created using the program Procreate on my iPad. I used a digital medium because I knew what style I wanted to replicate in my artwork, that being the look of certain children's books. Often times children's books have a "soft" art style with bring colors and no harsh lines. I achieved this digitally by experimenting with different colors and using an overlay layer to adjust certain values at the end. By using a digital program I was also able to put each part of the robot on a different layer, then set it to alpha lock after drawing the bass shape. Doing this allowed me to use a soft airbrush to create highlights and shadows, creating the illusion of 3D objects. 

The first step to creating this artwork was coming up with the initial idea. First, I knew I wanted to draw a robot, and second, it was around Christmas time and I wanted to them my art around the holiday. From that came the idea of a Robot with a Santa hat. After that, I sketched out a few basic ideas, where I had the idea to add a kid on a snow day into the mix. My first design of the robot was based on a snow plow but I got too frustrated with the accuracy of having a bipedal plow truck. That's when I settled on a bot that could carry around goods, something that could theoretically be used year-round, and that it was doing its assigned task on a day that happened to be a snow day. In my original sketch, I also included an adult suspiciously eyeing the robot, but I decided against adding that because it went agest the idea that this was man and machine's "good future".  I used soft colors and shading to emulate the style of certain children's books. I also achieved this through cartoon-looking character designs, lots of round shapes, and simplified looks.