I wasn't planning to draw anything for @opheliafu's Doodle Doodledayeo Round 13 because the prompts Dream / Cyber / Sci-fi were leading me in a really abstract direction of trying to think about an AI's dreams in cyberspace, but I had no idea how I would represent that visually. Then I thought about the prompts a different way, rather than cyberspace Cyber could be cybernetic organisms (cyborgs). And there's a famous sci-fi novel with “Dream” right in the title: Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner. So I decided to draw a cyborg reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? while having some maintenance done on their arm, with the idea that it would be an interesting interplay to see a sci-fi (to us) character reading a paper book (which would be very retro in their world) about a speculative (to us) future. I wasn't sure about the geometry of the character pose so I snapped a selfie for reference:
Then I started drawing. Here's the raw scanned image:
I was originally going to have blank, robotic eyes with the only organic element of the cyborg being the “brain-in-a-jar” thing going on with the head. But early on, when the only thing I had were the eye sockets, the book, and the top of the head, I decided to put organic eyeballs into the cyborg, a la RoboCop. Something about the eyes and the shape of the skull read feminine to me, so I tried to give her torso a somewhat feminine shape as well, even though I had originally intended to keep closer to my own photo reference. My concept was actually going to have two characters, the cyborg reading the book and a human technician leaning over the other arm and doing something to it, maybe installing a new hand or something. But that vision was farther out on the cartoony end of the spectrum, and I wasn't sure I could create a human character that was sytlistically close enough to the cyborg I had to be part of the same image, so the technician got replaced by an industrial robot (which may be happening to a lot of people in the not-too-distant future, even this story of my process has sci-fi parallels). I did some color adjustment and eraser touch-ups in GIMP:
And then I imported it into Inkscape and did a bitmap trace. I removed a few stray extra speckles and saved this as my final image:
The image is a bit different than what I planned when I started, but the changes all came from following the art where it seemed to be taking me and I'm pretty satisfied with where I ended up.