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'AL-76's day on Earth'

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Happy Robot day!
Here's a short "free interpretation" of the story by Isaac Asimov : "Robot AL-76 Goes Astray".

This was one of the 'creative assignments' I had on a watercolor class I took this semester. Since I was still beginning to get used to the technique, some are a lot better than others, but I still put all of them for the sake of completion. And of course this was a pretty appropiated day for that.
(I decided to use this bizarre format to make them work better as a sequence, hopefully it won't break your screen!)

If you haven't read the story (could be an interesting read for today, it's also (atleast slightly) on the more 'comedy' oriented work of Asimov) in a nutshell it takes place on a near future where groups or robots are sent from Earth to work on the Moon. The story follows AL-76 who is a robot from one of those groups that somehow lost its course and came back to Earth. Since the robot was 100% programmed to be on the Moon, many of the things he finds on Earth are weird or even senseless for him.
He ends up talking to a man who has a small junkyard and begins to 'work' (still thinking that he's on the Moon) making a huge monstruous monument of a kind that should work on the moon. And at the moment he activates it, the building makes a giant explosion that 'absorbs' animals, trees and part of a hill.
After that, the man asks the robot to forget everything to avoid getting involved on the accident, and then the robot is found by engineers of the Robot Company, who are particularly curious about what the robot did to create such a huge disaster and its scientific value; but end up pretty disappointed since the robot followed the order of the junkyard man and forgot everything he knew.

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Didn't know the story. I don't know if I completely get the meaning. I should read the complete version. Great work in any case. The combination of the watercolour, black ink and your style reminds me of Tony Ross his work (the one who made Towser the Dog). I always liked that style. I wish you had used smoother paper. It already has a very organic look, but with the lines over every image in becomes a little too messy. Newgrounds could do with more art like this. Breaks nicely from the clean computer art. This has a nice human feel. Very alive.

Butzbo responds:

Heh, my teacher mentioned the excess of linework aswell ; for a watercolor class I was still relying a bit too much on lines, which is something I had to improve a bit on the following works (may upload another one soon'').
Thanks for the review!

This is really something bro. I haven't read Asimov in a long time, but this piece certainly will compel me to seek out the reference story... at least I know it's something my crappy library will have.

Considering what's outside my door ("junk"), this work is personally quite moving, since I'm the robot in this equation O_o It's an awfully large file, took a few tries to get it completely loaded, but I appreciate your work in general... Happy Robot Day, glad to see this piece did a double duty!

Butzbo responds:

I kind of broke the page somehow with the file, Hahah, I made it a bit smaller after realizing that.
thanks for the review!

Credits & Info

Artist
Views
5,644
Faves:
34
Votes
10
Score
3.98 / 5.00

Uploaded
Jul 10, 2013
4:03 PM EDT
Category
Illustration

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