Whenever Victoria artist Jose Brand has a creative roadblock he returns to robots.
Brand’s love for the metallic monsters inspired him to create a second robot-themed colouring book after he released his first amidst a “colouring book craze” eight years ago.
“If I can’t come up with an idea, I’ll just draw robots,” said Brand. “That kind of led into this thing where I was just drawing robots all the time and doing lots of digital art. Then when the colouring book craze happened, I’m like, ‘I could just do outlines of some of my previous drawings and put them all together in a book and sell it as a colouring book’.”
The second book, Weird Robots, is expected to be 24 pages of uncanny and unique machines. One of Brand’s creations he’s thrilled to put in his book is a transparent robot.
“When I first drew the robot, I didn’t really think about doing that. So all the outer shell is completely transparent. You can see inside the brain, you can see inside the arms and torso. Then I threw all the little details in there and that was just a very organic drawing and I really enjoyed kind of how it came together and it’s probably one of my favourite ones,” said Brand.
When the artist started drawing the cartoon droids for his first colouring book Robot Factory, he wanted to explore “obsolete robots” or “what happens to technology” when it’s no longer needed.
“Almost every page in this old Robot Factory colouring book they’re taking care of a cat or they’re just doing simple tasks but they’re happy and enjoying themselves,” Brand said.
“Then over time just to make the robots more interesting or just maybe where my mind was at the time they just got a little bit weirder. There is not really a theme other than it is just kind of fun illustrations and robots doing interesting things like the rocket jet packs and riding on scooters.”
The artist is in the last stretch of putting the final touches on the pages and the front cover. After a little bit of fine-tuning the colouring book is off to the printing press. Tentatively, Brand said Weird Robots is expected to be out on March 1, available on josebrand.com.
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