Junkyard robot

According to my spreadsheet — yes, I keep a spreadsheet listing all the cards I make and who they get given to, how else am I supposed to keep track? — according to my spreadsheet, this is handmade card number 600 🎉 I have been doing this since 2014 so that’s averaging around two a week, though last year and this are closer to one a week and Christmas counts for over half of that.

Anyway, this card… The joy of having an already poor sense of time made worse by all the coronavirus changes is that you find yourself realising that you have about two days to come up with a card design for friend, make it, and get it in the post, and even then it’s 50-50 whether it arrives in time. Oh, and it’s a masculine card.

I looked back over the cards I’d made for him in the past — not much in the way of inspiration, but at least I could avoid repeating myself. Then I remembered a particular robot digi stamp and thought I might be able to do something with that. I’ve used this digi once before on a Christmas card for another friend.

This particular friend does get through quite a bit of tech kit, so I figured I’d have the robot standing on top of a pile of old computers. I am terrible at drawing anything without a reference, so I hunted through Google images for something appropriate to work from.

The only problem with combining digi stamps and your own line work is that they rarely match. It’s obvious that it’s not just one image. But I came up with a solution: I printed the digi stamp at the right size and traced it using my lightbox and added the pile of kit underneath. Same pen, same line thicknesses, one consistent image.

I coloured the pile first and then created the background — the fence was simple to create with the Copic markers and made a change from my default grass/sky. I left the robot till last; my other half suggested making it red and Copic reds bleed really easily if you catch them with a lighter marker, so it was much safer to colour the sky first.

Finishing touches included a bit of white pen for highlights, red Gelly Roll for the buttons and antenna sparks, and a few dabs of glossy accents on the eyes and antenna ball.

Copic markers:

robot body – E19, E07, R27
robot wheels – N9, N7, N5
junk 1 – BV20, E43, E41
junk 2 – E40, YR30, E0000
junk 3 – C3, C1, C00
other junk – combos of T0, T2, T3, T5, T6, T8
shadows/ground – W3, W5, W7, W9
fence – W3, W4, W5, W7
green – YG63
grass – G46
sky – B000

Supplies:

• digital stamps:
  Opal Manor – robot
• pens:
  Gelly Roll – metallic red
  Sharpie extra-fine paint pen – white
• embellishments:
  Ranger glossy accents
• paper and card:
  Neenah Solar White 216gsm
  Hunkydory Adorable Scorable cotton white