“gears, wires, and wonder” -
an interview with the artist val, the robot

Step into the mechanical mind of Val, the Robot, the visionary behind the growing YouTube channel Automaton Arts. In an after-hours interview held at a Central Valley comic shop on 10 November 2024. Both still recovering from some sort of sickness, Val and Scott delve deep into the circuitry of an artist who’s redefining what it means to be both human and machine. With aisles of comics and collectibles as our backdrop, a brief silence caused by late-night shoppers and thought provoking philosophies on art, Val shares the complex process of searching for their ‘artist self’—a journey that fuses metal and imagination in the digital era.

From navigating the complexities of YouTube’s art scene to drawing inspiration from the precision of animation, Val’s story is one of passion, resilience, and a unique fusion of clockwork and creativity. We delve into the impact of a friendly rivalry with a classic video game villain, the respect they hold for iconic artists across generations as creatives who hold conflicting views as people, and how these influences fuel their work—bringing both story and soul into their creations.

Warning: interview contains explicit language and brief political commentary.

Excerpts from the interview with Val, the Robot.
(* Questions provided in advance for clarity)

Where does your origin story as an artist begin? (1:16)
“Every artist has an origin story, the trouble with those artist origin stories is that they’re usually really boring. I got interested in art from a pretty young age. My grandmother was an excellent artist. She was someone that… it was a different time, she was a good artist, but that’s where that ends for you in like the 50’s and 60’s, so I just grew up around all of her beautiful paintings and wood burnings and stuff, and it didn’t really occur to me how special that was ‘til a little later on in my life when I’d see her make something that really blew me away. You just create that. You know, when you’re a kid you kinda just think things fall from the sky. You never really think about where they’re from, so seeing someone actually just take an idea and create it and bring it to life was really fascinating, and I think I just kinda fell into the role. I have a lot of siblings and we all kinda went different roads a little bit, so we all jumped in different lanes and I think I just ended up in the artist lane. There’s something in there that’s like, it’s a hobby, it’s been a job for quite a few years now, but it’s also kinda like a compulsion like if nobody paid me I’d have to do it anyway cause I’d just go crazy when you can’t draw.”
Were they’re projects that sort of defined you early on as an artist? (4:45)
Laughs "Yes, though none of them really survived to this day. Most of them I kind of got rid of. I actually started in elementary school—fifth or sixth grade. My six-year-old brain was like, okay, drawing’s really hard, so I gotta do it a lot to get good at it, but all of the good artists I knew made stories. So, I’m going to make a comic. That was my method: no matter how bad it is, I’m just going to draw it, and as it goes, I’ll get good. I had this really complicated plot—I was a big reader, so I had all kinds of fantasy nonsense ping-ponging around my head. Every idea I could think of, I threw in there, with all kinds of schemes to make it easier to draw, like excuses to simplify characters. It was unreadable beginning to end. Then in junior high, it almost got worse because I was so frustrated I couldn’t figure out art. I angrily started drawing stick figures and things like that. I’d draw people moving, stick figures running and jumping, thinking maybe that would get me there. Those are long gone, thankfully. I never want to see them again.”
How did your art develop start and turn into the style it is now?* (7:14)
"Honestly, it’s kind of interesting. If you looked at my art from back then, you’d definitely be like, 'Oh yeah, this is actually the same guy.' It’s a straight line in some ways, and part of that is just stubbornness. I think everyone’s art style is defined a bit by their weaknesses, right? You know what you’re good at drawing, but especially when you’re young and really want people to notice your art, you learn to work around your weaknesses. You’re drawing characters and poses you’re familiar with, and when someone asks you to draw something, you’re thinking, 'How do I make this look like I can draw anything?' You avoid what you’re not good at, and ironically, that becomes part of your style.
For me, one of the things that happened is that my art became very 'scramble-y,' with rough and blurry lines. It disguises imprecision; if something’s sketchy and weird, you don’t have to get every detail right. That became a big part of what I do. Over time, I learned how to refine it and work details into that style. The hard part is that working around your weaknesses becomes your 'style,' and it’s easy to tell yourself that learning fundamentals will make you lose what’s individual about you. But that’s not true—you go out, you learn, you draw differently for a while, and you always come back home to your style, just better because of the new techniques you’ve picked up."
As an artist, who are your top sources of Inspiration, if you had to create a Mt. Rushmore? (16:26)
"Good question! I think I can do that, actually. So, there are a few really significant ones that have had a huge impact on me. Let’s see if I can get all the names right. The first big one is kind of specific, but it’s distinct. I grew up around my grandmother, who was a huge influence on my artistic inspiration. She’s a massive nerd from back in the day, so she would read Lord of the Rings to me when I was a kid, and we’d watch old dark fantasy cartoons. But my favorites were the Rankin/Bass Lord of the Rings movies. They did The Hobbit and Return of the King, and they look so strange. It’s the same company that did The Last Unicorn, which I think a lot more people know. For anyone unfamiliar, just google it—it looks very odd. I don’t know if I could ever look at it fairly because I saw it when I was a kid, so it was this giant, infinite world of fantasy to me."
(More discussion on the influence of how profoundly moving the concept of friendship is portrayed in those films).
"Alright, Mt. Rushmore of artists. The next one is a controversial figure. A lot of people don’t care for this guy, and I completely get why. He has terrible politics; I don’t agree with him. But I grew up with his art, and it’s a huge, huge influence on me, and that’s Doug Tennapel (Earthworm Jim, Five Iron Frenzy, Catscratch). Most people know him from Earthworm Jim. His art is excellent; it’s varied. He’s a huge creative inspiration to me because he’s kind of like an artistic gypsy. He gets around. I had VHS tapes of the Earthworm Jim cartoon when I was a kid, and I wore those out. His art’s really cool and bizarre. He’s done a couple of video games, like Escape from Neverhood, which is a claymation game—a whole different world. The idea of being a creative person and having the stability, contacts, and clout to say, 'I’m gonna make a stop-motion video game,' and then just making it happen? That is the dream."
(More discussion on Tennapel’s art style and his young graphic novel works, including Gear, described as Attack on Titan with the cats from Catscratch).
"Next in line, Mike Mignola. What is there to say about Mike Mignola? If you’re not familiar, he’s the creator of Hellboy. If you’re a fan of the Hellboy movies, you should read the comics. They’re super easy to pick up because they’re all just little short stories, so you’re not going to get lost. The art is amazing. Mignola actually travels to different places. All of his stories are based on fairy tales. He will travel to a place and just ask the locals about their fairy tales, and then he writes his stories from that on-the-ground research, speaking to people who have a deep-seated connection to their culture. That’s next-level stuff."
(More admiration for Mignola’s work and his advocacy).
(Admiration for other artists like Yoji Shinkawa of Metal Gear, Tetsuya Nomura, and Yoshitaka Amano of Final Fantasy).
"But there’s a lot of very cartoony art that has influenced me, and it’s frustrating because it’s the art I can’t quite master. I practice cartoon art because I want to have it in my portfolio, but it’s very, very hard for me. It’s abstracting. Drawing a chibi character for me is like trying to thread a needle with shaky hands. It’s the most frustrating process—it’s designed to be simple, but the process of doing it makes me so frustrated.
"You know what…John Kricfalus, the guy who made Ren and Stimpy. I grew up with a lot of the early cartoon cartoons. Also, the guy [Craig McCracken] who did Powerpuff Girls, Dexter’s Lab, and Samurai Jack. He’s one of the most famous animators. You could wake me from a cold sleep any day, and I’d tell you his name, but now that I need it, I’m blanking. Okay, whatever his name is, call me a poser in the comments—it’s fine. I earned it. Roast as necessary. That really rubbery art style had a big effect on me. He’s an insane rigger. No two frames of animation look the same. Dexter’s Lab, for me, will always be his crowning achievement."
How do you think living in the Central Valley or your travels have affected you as an artist, if at all? (28:43)*
“There’s a lot honestly. There’s a couple of aspects to that. Being here in the Central Valley is great, because the cost of living is very low. You can pursue an artistic career, I don’t know if you can say with ease cause it’s never easy to just become a professional artist. You can’t just pick up and do that at anytime you want, but living in a place where it is relatively low cost of living really, really helps. You can work a almost full-time job and still get some art done on the side. You know one of the biggest barriers for people who wanna do any kind of hobby you have to have the time, you have to have the energy. To put in an 8 hour day and then come home and try to be creative, it’s brutal. I did it for years. You gotta try to stay alive, you gotta eat, so I’d get up in the morning and draw, goto work for 8 hours and come home and try to draw. I made so little progress during that time. You’re running on empty. Just going to sleep and start over again. I never felt like I was more stuck-in-place than when I was working full-time and trying to draw on the side. When I was finally able to stop that and I was able to cut-down to part-time hours, it was like baffling. It was like coming out of the matrix. I swear to God. I feel like there was color I couldn’t see before…(more elaboration on the conflicting schedules between professional life and creative life).”
If we look back at your journey, what’s the biggest 'artistic leap of faith' moment you’ve taken? (31:13)
“That’s a tough one. So, for me one of the most difficult, but I think it’s one of the one’s that every artist has to face at a certain point if you wanna do it professionally. I always tell people that when you start doing art, you should start as far away from your real life as possible. Go make like a DeviantArt or something. Make a name that’s whatever, because there’s a good quote on this that I remember that I’m about to quote completely wrong. I’ll give you the spirit of it. I heard this and it really stuck with me. “The worst way to be an artist is to think about how everyone will think about your art. When you’re drawing and you’re thinking about - how will my parents feel about this? How will my sister like this? How will my friends judge this? That is all just rain cloud. Just garbage that’s gonna make you second guess every everything you do. You should start as far away from the real world as possible, where you can draw something crazy and if someone thinks its terrible, it doesn’t matter ‘cause their an NPC and they’ll go away once you close your computer…(more on the challenges on talking art with critics and reinforcing what you do as an artist).”
You mentioned that you write as well. Do you find that there’s an overlap between the two, and if so, where do you see that? (38:55)*
“A hundred percent, yeah. INSERT A LATE SHOPPER INTERACTION. So I’m gonna go a little wide answering this one, but I think it makes for an appropriate analogy. So, you know how like in school, you learn a bunch of weird math, right? It’s like the classic joke of I’m never gonna use this again in real life, am I? I had a math teacher say one time. I thought this was really fascinating. Classic question, when am I gonna need to know how to do this? And he was like, “Probably never, realistically, but that’s not what you’re here to do. You’re trying to train your brain to understand logical exercises.” You are working out the part of your brain that can do this kind of stuff, figure it out, and solve logic puzzles. You don’t need to remember this math to have gotten smarter for having learned it. You’re widening your base of information. You are learning that things can be solved with logic and reason, and how to look up information and how to understand it. Everything sort of on the left side of your brain is like a pyramid, the more different things you understand, the easier it is to understand new things. If you understand a little bit about physics, you probably have an easier time understanding how engine goes together. If you know a little bit about chemistry, you’re gonna know a little bit about food nutrition. All of these elements kind of help each other. And I find over in the other half of your brain creatively, it’s the same thing. It’s really, really good to branch out and explore different creative mediums, because it sort of teaches you ways to think about things differently. If you wanna write Drama it pays to write Comedy….(More on the shared experience gauge of transferring skills, the relationship between writing and art, and the psychology of art).”
Since we are in a comic shop, is there a run for a character run that would be the dream of working on? (49:55)
“That’s a good question. Honestly, never really thought of myself as someone that would take up a mantel in that way. I think that something that doesn’t get, among comic book circles sure, but I think in the broad world of art and sort of our culture in general people don’t appreciate what it is be the, “Okay you’re the guy who draws Batman now.” What that is on your shoulders is immense. It is no simple thing. People will remember your failures forever. People will - We just talked about Rob Liefield. Rob Liefield has been getting roasted for twenty years now. People still trash on him, and he never got any better, so that’s on him like I don’t think people are saying “Rob Liefield, I don’t think he improved from then and now.” They’re going, “Look at this art from the 90’s, it’s so bad. You f-up in comic books, that is for life. You go to your grave with that. You can laugh about it or not, but it’s yours. You got it forever. So, when I think about characters that I would like to put my art to, it’s generally things that aren’t adapted already. There’s books that I think would make excellent animations or graphic novels. I would love to be the art lead on stuff like that. (more on media adaptations, the engagement that novels have on the human mind, and high praises for the novel Ender’s Game).”
We talked about Metal Gear in one of first conversations, Kojima was quoted saying that “while everyone is made up of 70% water, he was 70% film,” so i’d like to add at the very least a soundtrack to your art asking what songs you’d like people to think about in the background while people looked at your art? (56:12)
“That’s very interesting. One, they [the channel’s Youtube videos] already have music in them, so how dare you! That’s a really good question. I listen to all the musics. I don’t really have a lot of walls up in the stuff that I listen to. But part of it is that, I don’t generally listen to music when I draw. I know it’s fairly common for people to do that. I personally find it very soothing to have - sometimes chill music something that has no lyrics that I can just sort of blend-in for me. But I’ll spend time with like ear worms. I like a lot of music with humor in it. It’s just me personally, I connect better with humor. I can get more emotionally invested in a character that makes me laugh then one whose life is a tragedy, so I find a lot of music that is very humorous something that I can work into my process creatively. Part of it is that I am very literal, and that’s why my art’s the way it is. That’s kind of always been with me. When I was young, I had a lot of big ideas from the music I heard ‘cause I grew up - on my dad’s side it was all oldies and folk music and stuff and my mom’s was nothing but classic rock so i’d hear all kinds of crazy prog rock and stuff.”
I had the chance to watch some of your catalogue posted on the channel, Automaton Arts, update and other videos in preparation for this; What were some of the first challenges you faced in the beginning? (1:04:48)
“The biggest one is the classic ADD project drift. You start on one thing with that you start feeling different ideas come in, then I wanna work on that now, so there was a lot of that going on. A big part of it was I just hadn’t found my voice in that way. My artistic voice, certainly. Definitely wasn’t there with my comedic voice. I didn’t really know how to tell stories. The elements were there, I knew what I wanted to do, but I would just constantly try to change up the format, try different things to sort of get there. In my very, very early stuff. The oldest stuff from my webpage from like 2013 is exactly what I’m doing now, which is drawing art and talking about… (More on the progression as a YouTube artist and gamer, and developing a reasonable format).”
Since I began watching Automaton Arts a little late, could you tell us a little about the sort of rivalry you have with Megaman's villain Cut-man? (1:12:12)
“That comes from me and my friend, Nate. A buddy of mine, who we did all of the Megaman videos with. We’ve just been pals since we were kids and we’re both big fans of Megaman and in most Megaman media, Cut-Man is a joke. He is the chump of the franchise. A lot of my friends are sort of retro video game nerds. It’s not that retro for us, for me and you and a lot of people our age the NES was only a couple of years before us, so it’s not like retro gaming we’re just old. I grew up playing Megaman and a bunch of my friends did too. We were just people that had NES’ growing up. So, this is like a completely alien experience if you didn’t play that game ‘cause NES games are very, very difficult and Megaman let’s you start anywhere you want. But as a kid, Cut-Man is the first guy you know how to beat, because his level’s is the easiest and his pattern is the easiest. Everyday I’m gonna get up and I’m gonna beat up Cut-Man and we’ll see where I go from there. I don’t know if I’m gonna beat this game, but for sure I’m gonna beat up Cut-Man! (More on the comedy of Cut-Man, an impression from the animated series, and a brief discussion on the fan art on Automaton Arts).”
Advice for individuals that consider taking this path. (1:15:39)*
“Oh yeah. I actually wrote down a few if you don’t mind. I had a feeling that question was coming. There’s a couple pieces of advice I would give to up-and-coming artists or in particular if you’re someone that wants to do art, but I don’t wanna do art. If you feel the brick wall in front of you, because like I said I still don’t feel like I’m good. You never really do. Part of being an artist is having a fraud complex, so you’re always going to tell yourself you can’t. Don’t let that slow you down. That feeling that what you’re doing isn’t good enough. That thing that you’re creating is cheap and people won’t care about it and you’ll never hit the level that people will appreciate you. Those are the signs that you can be a good artist. All of those flags are not red flags. That is you seeing the actual challenge in front of you and appreciating what actually goes into it. (More advice on drawing past your frustratations and visualizing challenges as opportunities to get better).”
Conclusion - last minute additions. (1:24:04)
“Sure, I’ll throw one last thing on here ‘cause it’s a little preachy, but I think it’s important. At the end of the day, art and culture are the same thing. What we create is the only thing that survives us… (more on the importance of art and records to society).