How to Paint a Robot Without Making It About Technology

Ignore the future. Focus on posture.

Technology tends to drag everything forward. Wires, screens, references to progress, the suggestion that something new is about to happen. I’m not sure we are ready genetically and mentally for the advancements in technology that are happening at the moment. My favourite kind of robots are the ones in programmes like Loki and Fallout. Robots of the past.

Painting techy future style robots is where paintings start to feel like predictions, which can be distracting (I mean, I’ll draw any kind of robot, but that’s not what this blog post is about). To avoid this, stop thinking about the robot as technology at all.

Treat it as a body instead.

Posture does more work than circuitry ever will. A robot standing upright can feel confident, obedient, tense, or uncertain depending on the smallest shift.

A slight lean suggests thought. A balanced stance suggests nothing in particular, which is often more interesting. With good posture, the future becomes irrelevant. The robot is no longer a symbol of what might come next. If you forget to wonder what it can do and start noticing how it occupies space, then the technology has already receded.

If you want to see robots that are less interested in the future and more concerned with standing (or hanging) correctly, there are several on this site such as https://www.vikoi.com/shop/p/a-cute-darkness.

They are not predicting anything.

They just want good posture.