Valentine robot

The combination of feeling utterly uninspired and also wanting to avoid a repeat of last year’s slightly misjudged Valentine card design left me in a bit of a quandary as to what to do for this Valentine’s day. Doing nothing was definitely not an option.

I remembered that I had a couple of robot picture frames that I’d picked up ages ago — I think it was one of those “I just need to spend a few pounds more to get free shipping” orders 🙂 And I also have stacks of miscellaneous “stuff that might be useful for future mixed media projects” including some random boards and bits of electronics that my other half was going to throw out.

So I gathered together some of those, along with wire, metal mesh, and a handful of cogs and set to work coming up with arrangements for the front and back of the robot.

I recently got a set of Stuart Semple’s Heavy Metal metallic paints — given to me by my other half so not breaking my self-imposed “only buy stuff I really need” guideline which is actually really more of a “don’t buy stuff on impulse” rule — so I decided to use those as the colour scheme. The black gold ends up looking more like a metallic dark brown in this application, but it works well as a neutral colour base. And I really love the copper colour I used for the feet and “ears”.

The cogs were painted in the super-matte black 3.0, and the eyes were done using the metallic gold. The mesh was brushed over with black gesso.

I made the heart with Efcolor enamels. That’s another of those things that has sat on my shelf for quite some time: I’d picked up some enamel powders and a little kiln (heated by tea lights) out of curiosity and never got around to trying it… The heart doesn’t have the perfect glossy domed finish that you can get with enamels, but that’s basically because I was being too stingy with the powder! The next attempt will be better.

Then it was just a case of assembling it all. I did glaze over the central panel of components, just to tone down the bright green of the boards. There were a couple of small holes in the top of the robot’s head so I glued the legs of an LED in them using glossy accents. And I covered up the holes on the shoulders with domed embellishments.

And my other half loved it. I have another robot frame in my stash and we have a vague plan to do that as a joint project and add functioning electronics to it…