Attack of the Giant Robot!

[Click to enlarge]

The Walker-as-robot metaphor gets literal next month as the annual Student Open House welcomes Giant Robot magazine founders Eric Nakamura and Martin Wong for an artist talk. To promote the event–which also features kung fu films, music by Birthday Suits (with former members of Sweet J.A.P.), and big-screen Mortal Kombat battles–Walker designer Scott Ponik turned to a friend, Souther Salazar, to create an original artwork. I emailed Souther, who illustrated a GR cover last winter and is friends with the magazine’s founders, to see how the drawing came to be. His reply:

i came up with the design by asking scott to tell me about the walker, the event, about minneapolis this time of season, the trees, the animals, and anything else he could think of. scott gave me a list, told me about the leaves on the ground, the state bird, the look of the walker center, and many other things.

after reading his list and looking at the pictures he sent, i sat sat down and drew everything that came to mind. i made the giant robot logo into a real robot that eric and martin are inside of, piloting it on their way through minneapolis. the 2-man band, the birthday suits are slightly ahead of them on the bridge. i had them all coming in from the left because that’s the side of the paper i started on, and their destination, the walker center, on the right, because that is where i finished.

Get a free button created from the illustration at the October 5 event.

Further Souther: Don’t miss this series of process photos of the installation of one of Salazar’s murals or the artist guest-blogging for Giant Robot.