beep boop robot painting

I was asked about a month ago to paint something for my friend Toby's wife's birthday. The theme was robots and my instructions were:


  • cute but not too girly
  • she likes monkeys
  • can one of the robots be saying 'beep boop'?

I'm not sure if Toby knew this or not, but I've never painted a picture bigger than about 6 inches square, so this was quite a challenge - the painting is A2 size, which is bloody big when you're used to making tiny, tiny fiddly things. I also had to change my drawing style - since the canvas was so big I couldn't do the tiny drawings I would normally do. I guess I could've filled the painting with hundreds of tiny pictures, but that would take f.o.r.e.v.e.r and also probably wouldn't be what he wanted.

It was harder than I actually thought it would be though, I'm not very good at not drawing tiny things - I mean, I can draw from life pretty well, as long as the paper isn't too big, but this needed to be cartoon-ish in style, and cute and colourful, and that's just not what I'm used to.

Unlike a normal "commission", I didn't actually ask much about what he wanted, and he trusted me enough to just do what I thought he'd like. It was a bit of an unusual arrangement, but when I sent him a photo of it a couple of hours ago he said it was exactly what he had wanted, so either he knows how my brain works better than I do, or he's pretending to like it, or I'm a psychic genius... let's go with the latter, I think.

Don't tell him, but I only actually started it last night. Talk about leaving things to the last minute. I was planning to start it about a week ago (which is still pretty naughty since I drew the original design a month ago, not that the final thing turned out anything like the original design!) but with craft fair crapiness last weekend and then the explodey head pain last week, I just kept putting it off...


Yoyo helping every step of the way!

...but I don't think it's too bad, and I'm pretty sure I stuck to the brief.


Her birthday party is tonight - I hope she likes it!

2 hellos:

Unknown said...

It looks lovely and just perfect for the client. xx

Vixie said...

Well at least someone likes it :)

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