Doodle Penance: "jack kirby machines"

I'm pretty psyched about this week's Doodle Penance, not because I think I've done an especially good job with the doodle, but because this week's search term was absolutely, 100%, or-your-money-back guaranteed from the start to be fun to draw. And I did have a lot of fun with my doodle.

Someone found our site this week after a search for "Jack Kirby machines."

I can't think of a nicer way to spend a Sunday morning.

I figure what this person was looking for was a good set of principles for building his own Kirbytech machinery, so I've created this handout that outlines a few of the most important points. I hope it's helpful.

(Isaac says, "Don't ask! Just click and enlarge it!")



Have a look at how some of these ideas are employed in a couple of panels from Fantastic Four #46.

You can use the principles of Kirby machine design to create something as complex as a two-man Terrigen-mutation-scanning device ...



... or something as simple as a cigarette lighter:



Mike, what have you got?

—All's I've got is a Jack Kirby machine:
There's a lot I'm dissatisfied with where the drawing is concerned. But my greatest mistake was giving it a name! I should merely have referred to is as a Jury-rigged Apparatus for Cartooning Kind-of-Kinetic, Idiosyncratic, Robotic Beings with exposed circuitrY, instead of shortening it to Jack Kirby! But now, as you can see from the vexed expression in the view-screen, it can reason...can compute...can feel...and, as is plainly evident from its uni-wheel, it wants to move...to be free..! Despite all the fear it may engender, I pity this machine-man, this monster!

Stereoscopic Cosmic Ukulele

I was so taken with our friend Ben Towle's Kirby-style ukulele (in turn inspired by our own post on Kirbytech) that I wanted to fiddle with the image a little bit myself.

What I've done here is turned it into another stereoscopic 3-D image. If you stare at the picture below and let your eyes relax -- or look at it as if you're looking at something farther away -- the two halves of the image should swim together to assemble a third composite image, which will be in 3-D.



Some people have an easier time seeing the small version of this image, but depending on your screen size or screen resolution, you may also be able to get the full-size image to assemble. It'll be pretty dramatic, I think. Click on it and give it a try.

You may also find it more dramatic if it looks like it's toppling towards you:



The hardest part of creating this image was getting all of the fiddly extra parts of the uke outlined with my "angle-lasso" tool, so I could cut it free from the background. If you've got any questions on how I did this, please post 'em in the comments. I'm happy to offer preliminary tips, for what they're worth.

Update: I wanted to make sure Ben could see what I'd done, so I goofed around with the "Selective Color" feature long enough to figure out how to make a proper red-green 3-D image. Ben, if you've got some spare 3-D glasses, click to enlarge this one!