A Skellybot Wedding

I think this is probably one of my favorite drawings I’ve ever done. I put this together in a drawing class. We were learning about isometric perspective and instead of going the simple shapes route I saw other people taking, I remember wanting to create something pretty wild. This was based on an earlier print that I did called “Skellybots Upcycle”, where two robotic skeletons have various bits of trash but they are pretending to be humans and using the trash for fashion and function. I wondered what else the skellybots might do, and how they came to be. I recently thought, maybe in a far future an artificial intelligence finds nothing but human skeletons on the planet, and reassembles themself to look like what they found. (This sh*t keeps me up at night, folks.)

I never “finished” this drawing, or rather, it stayed a drawing in a portfolio somewhere and nothing else came of it. But as i’ve been pulling my artwork together for this website, I ran into this one again. I decided to try to render it digitally. At first I tried using photoshop, but I’ve recently been learning to use other adobe programs and just started using illustrator. So I took the photo, used a perspective crop to correct it, then cranked up the contrast and levels. I created a transparent colored layer to trace over in illustrator.

I skipped back and forth between illustrator and photoshop to fill in blacks, colors, and get some fun textures going.

overall I had a really fun time with this piece and am thrilled with how it turned out. I think this a good revival of my skellybots. I’m working on a digital remake of “Skellybots Upcycle”, which I hope to have out in the next week or so. Time to get prints!

A Skellybot Wedding, 2020

Click here to see a “making of” video!