If you follow me here or on social media, you know every year I curate and promote an artist calendar. Each year, we come up with a theme and then we draw something for each month based on that theme. For 2016’s calendar, the most voted on theme was “tales”, meaning fairy tales, folk tales, etc.

My first thought was to create something based on Red Riding Hood, but I didn’t want to do anything incredibly cliche.

I puttered around the idea a lot and decided I could probably go with something a little different. I’m a big fan of sci-fi (if you couldn’t tell), and I love reading about androids, robots, cyborgs, etc. So I started thinking about the tale of Pinnochio. I did some more reading about the original text of Pinnochio and what it meant, and I kept thinking it was a lot like a basic childish AI in a machine. I came up with this whole backstory for a modern sci-fi Pinnochio, where Jimminy Cricket would be his conscience circuit, and Bloogle (Blue Fairy Google) was where Pinnochi0 went to figure out how he could become “real”. Of course this has some grounding in say, Kikaider, Ghost in the Shell, and various other android influenced things I am a fan of. Anyway, the work is not currently up in my portfolio, but here is the work (animated gif!) and a process video of me getting there.