The Aartvark: May 22, 2011 Robots & Monsters

Sunday, May 22, 2011

May 22, 2011 Robots & Monsters

I have posted here before about Joe Alterio's "Robots and Monsters" project. They select a cause. They offer to do original color drawings of your monster or robot of choice (size is about 6x6 inches) for $50. You specify whether you want a robot or a monster, and you give them 3 words that describe what you want your creature to embody. Any 3 words - this ain't played by Scrabble rules. Joe started it, but he has a group of artists in the bullpen, now. I think they split this $50 about 50:50; artists got to eat. Their causes have been Doctors without Borders, water.org, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the SF AIDS Foundation. Fifty bucks for a cool custom art piece with a charity ping... make good gifts. Imagine those hard to shop for nieces and nephews who have interests you know... just send the interests and get a robot or a monster that depicts these.

http://robotsandmonsters.org

Just as with my requests to DVS, I like to ask for a series. Why get one piece when you can get 12 in a theme?

This time around, I decided to see what Joe could do with the signs of the Chinese zodiac. Although these are usually associated with our Western years, you should probably go by the Lunar calendar. And there are variations depending on the translation (sheep vs goat, mouse vs rat). Here are the lunar years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_zodiac

I'll put in one main Western calendar year and you can go in multiples of 12 to figure out any others. I'll cluster these in groups of three, for the signs that are meant to be compatible with one another. For my 3 words I used the animal, and a couple of the main descriptors of the character.

1960: rat, friendly, greedy