Bakerbot’s Creative Design
My wife and I started kicking around the idea of me doing up some sort of cake-robot illustration for her cake company that she could put up in her kitchen and I thought it’d also make for a great desktop wallpaper. I got right to work on it after she went onto Colour Lovers and picked out a nifty color scheme for me. This robot was more difficult to work out than the waiter robot I did last week.
Some times when I sit down and start sketching out a robot, it’s easy to get obsessed over little details very quickly, so I fight against that and try to stay loose and very, very rough. I wrote down some things that I wanted to see in the final version of the illustration to keep the robot’s structure on track: measuring cups, cake pans, cup cakes, mixers, an oven or two, flour and eggs. Not all of those things made it into the final illustration, but it helped me consider what should go on the frame of the robot before I even started drawing.
I think that the character, style and personality of the robot is largely dominated by the head and I usually start out with that first. At this point, I was just experimenting around with shapes. I thought it would be important for a baker robot to be able to taste what it’s making to see if it’s tasty or not and I put a lot of work and focus into the mouth. I also liked the idea of the robot’s head being squished down and flat.
After working on the mouth a lot, I felt like I was once again falling into the trap of working too much on one detail and moved onto the body. I thought that it’d be a good idea to construct the body around an oven, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to get the robot’s boxy shape to look feminine and still have an oven in it. Some other ideas I was toying around with at this point were multi-arm attachments for everything a baker might need, from cutting and piping to mixing and pulling hot things out of the oven. Another idea I had in the bottom right was an arm with a rotating wrist with multiple hands that did different things.
I started doing some research into chef clothing so that I could apply that onto my oven robot body. I came across some outfits and did a little sketch, which transformed the way I decided to do the body. I needed a defined “X” shape if this was going to look more feminine. I also experimented with the original short, flat head and put the chef hat on top of it to give it some style. I really liked the tall cylinder shape of the head and decided that the crazy mouth would look too dastardly or manly, so I did away with it and went for the smaller mouth.
At this point, the robot’s structure had pretty much taken shape and I was comfortable enough with it to start sketching out the kitchen area and figuring out the composition. I liked the idea of there being two cakes and possibly having some objects hanging from the ceiling to make the kitchen more of a sci-fi feel.
Here’s the last sketch on my wacom tablet. I was a little concerned about making an oven with a slanted door frame but it turned out looking fine. The egg dispenser was worked out by this point and most of the items were in place. The final illustration took about 25 hours or so.
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