Illustration Friday "Robot"

Bird Calling Robot Girl - Soft pastels over rough pencil sketch.

From time to time I like to do stream of consciousness drawings where I don't do any planning and put absolutely no thought ahead of time into what I am going to draw. I did know that the theme for Illustration Friday was robot but I did not consciously try to draw a robot. It's always interesting to me what is sitting around in my head just waiting to come out. This image in particular ended up foreshadowing an event that happened the following day. Here's the story...

When I finished drawing Bird Calling Robot Girl, I looked at it for a while trying to figure out what it meant. The story of the pied piper came to mind with the robot girl calling birds instead of rats. The very next day my daughter, Maia, found our kitty with a baby bird in his mouth getting ready to chomp down. Luckily she got there just in time to save the bird from the jaws of death. Since we didn't know what else to do with the bird we took it down to our neighbor Jane, who happens to be a wildlife expert. First Jane gave us a lecture on letting our cat run around outside and then she told us that we should have put the cat inside and left the little bird where we found it so that the mama bird would be able to find it and help it. She said that the baby was just trying to learn to fly and this is just the process they go through. But for now, since it was so late in the evening, Jane said she would take care of the bird until the next morning when she would come to our house with baby bird in hand and try to find the mama. We were concerned about our cat interfering so Jane said she would try to lure the mama bird to her yard where there was no cat and then she would put the baby down and let the mama do her thing. THEN Jane said that reminded her of the story of the pied piper and she proceded to tell the story to Maia who had never heard it. Well, I was just totally amazed by all of this and I showed Jane the drawing I did. She thought it was a pretty neat coincidence but I don't think she was as floored by it as I was. Anyway, that was two days ago and we were not able to find the parents so Jane is taking care of the bird until its wings are fully extended. She says that will be about a week and then it will be able to take care of itself.

As far as the robot part of the image - well, I guess that would be the robot gear on robot girl's head. I'm not really sure how it works - maybe you can use your imagination and let me know what you come up with!