Frank's Sketchbook Entry of the Day

Another abandoned project. A friend asked me to pick up a prescription and some food for her. The name sounded like a disco-robot (a dance-a-tron). I was thinking about what would a disco-robot look like. I tried to make some disco robot sketches, but to little avail. Then I thought about what would a disco robot look like? I decided to use THE canonical disco image as a reference, which is the Saturday Night Fever poster (I haven't actually seen the movie).

I found a version of it and drew a sketch of it, which wasn't too bad as a quick sketch. Then I tried to draw some robots in John Travolta's pose as well as his dance partner. And then...I wasn't really sure where the hell this could go. So I gave up on it.

I had drawn the images on a paper that had the drug name, and list of food to buy. The first cut of robots are on the bottom left. Then at the top right was my memory of movie poster. Note the disco-ball suspended from the dance-a-tron Mark III's head, and a spotlight shining on it from his left shoulder.

Below that is my sketch of the actual image and then I put a box around what I thought I'd need to capture. The pair of red robots in the sort of center is the result, robots that are a bit more '70s disco-ish. The fabrics look and fit better on the humans than the robots. It wasn't intentional.

The images were kind of all over the original paper on both sides, so I rearranged them to fit on one side. I removed the text of the shopping list wherever I could, but I didn't want to damage the images, so I left some stuff in (including the actual drug name). I'm not sure what the image in the center of the female robot partner is. It might be a disco ball or it might be a pair of lips with the inside of the mouth cross-hatched.

I drew this within the last 6-12 months. The full resolution image is here.