"I have been working on a couple of designs for my space robot adventure series. These range from the traditional 1950's "saucer" type UFO to a 1950's retro-style rocket ship. 

But nothing was coming out the way I wanted. Probably because I was working completely from my imagination and not any kind of reference material.

So I was looking up some old 50's sci-fi posters to see what I could find. 

Not only are there a ton of movies with amazing space ships, but a lot of these movies were distributed overseas so there are posters in Spanish, Italian, and dozens of other languages!

I had initially considered using a similar rocket style to the one above, but then I thought it might be a whole lot more interesting to just recreate the entire poster in my own style, but keeping all of the original elements.

And it was interesting. And fun. And super-informative. And not just graphically. 

Destination Moon (or "Con destino a la Luna" in Spanish) was a movie from 1950 that was based on a story by Robert Heinlein, the master of mid-century sci fi! He even co-wrote the movie with someone names Rip Van Ronkel, which has nothing to do with this post other than that it is one of the coolest names ever.

The plot of the movie is: 

"A team composed of an aerospace scientist (Warner Anderson), an ex-Air Force general (Tom Powers) and an industrialist (John Archer) conceive an ambitious plan to land Americans on the moon. From their base in the Mojave Desert, they construct and successfully launch a spacecraft named "Luna" that contains a cargo of four astronauts. But a critical miscalculation of needed power to escape the moon's gravitational pull may put the astronauts' lives in danger."

And perhaps most amazingly, Destination Moon won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects!

It's the longest I've ever spent on one drawing, and it's not perfect by any means. But that is EXACTLY the charm of the 1950's sci-fi movies. They were far from perfect by today's standards, but it was their imperfections that make them so much fun to watch now.

So I guess, in the end, it came out exactly how I was hoping!

I had no idea what I was sketching when I started working on this, but I think it's a continuation of the idea of a robot after an apocalypse, trying to deal with sentient animals as he navigates a new reality.

I liked the idea of a Circle K convenience store in the background, but making it a Circle A (with the anarchy symbol), possibly suggesting what caused the collapse of society? Not sure.

I also liked the idea that the only animals that would hang out with the robot were ones of similar color. I'm not sure why yet.

I'll let you know when I figure it out.

This sketch isn't about anything in particular.

I've just been working on line weight and shading.

Both of which, obviously, need A LOT of work.

And don't even get me started on my lousy, ambiguous, barely defined backgrounds!