The third Illustration in my illustration project wherewith I commemorate each of my favorite authors. This particular illustration comes from Isaac Asimov's "Robots of Dawn." It is done entirely with colored pencil excepting the full figure drawing of the three main characters, which was inked in the outlines. I was originally going to do it with no Ink but I dug my pencils in so many times that I would have never been able to tell what was what were I to attempt erasing my pencil lines.

So from left to right we have Daneel Olivaw, Elijah Baily, and Giskard Reventelov. They are on a planet called Aurora, which is mostly wilderness, and walking probably between estates. Daneel is the first humanoid Robot and he becomes increasingly important over thousands of years. Baily is a detective from Earth investigating the murder of another humanoid robot. Giskard is one of the many non-humanoid robots that service the humans on Aurora. He, like many others, was designed to be semi-humanoid to the point where he can be taken as a sentient being but not mistaken for a human.

I drew them all pretty much as I pictured them. The clothing was never really described in detail except for Baily's. They took away his earth clothes and burned them (or ejected them out into space), and gave him long pants and a long sleaved hooded shirt which shimmered with different colors depending upon how the light struck it. I attempted to show that here. From that I extrapolated the costume for Daneel. Originally I had pictured Daneel as wearing something like what he did on the front cover, but whenever I gave him a costume similar to that he ended up looking like a space nazi. So instead I tried to give him something that would be consistent with the fashions on Aurora. At any rate, I retained the blue and black because it seemed right for him. For Giskard he doesn't actually wear clothes because he is not anatomically correct, but rather, his surface is designed to give the appearance of being clothed. In the close up of his face I ended up making him look evil somehow, but it was completely an accident. Aside from that I don't really have any major regrets with this picture.


My favorite authors project:

JRR Tolkien: [link]
CS Lewis: [link]
Isaac Asimov: [link]
Frank Herbert: [link]
Brian Herbert: [link]
Frank Peretti:
Edger Rice Burroughs: