From Spark to Flame

Does your project require an original robot with a flaming microphone head and a body made out of music gear?. . . OK. Probably not. But this one did—and it was awesome.

Years back, I created some original artwork for a local band that they could use for an album cover, as well as posters and packaging. Because of the eclectic nature of their music, and the diverse background of the band members, we wanted the artwork to represent all of their styles coming together as one. After a few hours chatting about music, movies, and TV over a backdrop of noodling guitars and the rhythmic clank of beer bottles, the idea hit us: The music-gear-Frankenstein-combiner-robot. Or. . . something like that.

This was a project I was super into on a personal level. As a music and sci-fi nerd, it pushed a lot of my buttons in the right way. I spend a lot of time having to rein myself in when doing corporate stuff. Keeping designs sleek, clean and professional. Keeping my natural inclination to be an artistic weirdo contained under a trembling girdle of normalcy. . . . Cough . . . It was nice to let the weird out and make something a little wild.

I decided to make the robot be a play on Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. After settling on a rough sketch of what it might look like, I started extracting, editing and layering dozens of photo elements in Adobe Photoshop. After several days of editing and almost two dozen layers, I emerged from my office feral-eyed and wary of all sudden movements. But, Robot Frankenstein was alive.

Over the years, I did several variations and projects stemming from this artwork and always got a big kick out of it. It’s very gratifying as a graphic artist to create something that you can feel proud of years later and feel like it still holds up. To this day—years later—I’m proud to showcase music-gear-Frankenstein-combiner-robot as an example of the effectiveness of Stoneback, Inc. to help see crazy ideas come to fruition.

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