Annetts! As many as you can carry!

typed for your pleasure on 23 May 2020, at 1.13 am

Sdtrk: ‘Art today’ by Peel dream magazine

Under normal circumstances, I don’t make announcements on ‘Shouting etc etc’ whenever I post new additions to Galerie ECHO, as the blog would rapidly degenerate into a series of ‘oh snap, check it, peep the new art that just dropped in the Galerie, yo!!’ posts. Which would be, arguably, more continuous posting than I’ve done in years, ho ho. Also, if I’m writing like that, clearly I’ve experienced a stroke. But the fact that I’m developing an original character — which is a project in and of itself — should be mentioned, I think!

Back in 2017, I commissioned my favourite artist Yaruku to draw an illo of my Missus sitting atop a pile of discarded Gynoids. You’ve seen it before. As much as I love my Synthetik partners, they’re Dolls, not actual Gynoids, and I wanted to eventually have commissions made with Gynoids in various states of mechabare, which is a Japanese term (of course) that describes Gynoids and Androids wherein the fact that they’re machines is highlighted. So to that end, I came up with the original character, Annett, named after a Goth mannequin I used to have back in the late Nineties.


photo from roughly 2000. Annett didn’t play croquet; she just liked croquet mallets


SIDORE: ‘Annett’s a bit rude, she’s not said anything to me since I’ve moved in.’
ME: ‘She could just be shy!’
SIDORE: ‘No,
I’m shy, she’s rude!’

The fact that I lopped off the E at the end of Annett isn’t just some typical weird Davecat-spelling fumfuh; I took the name from a German fetish fashion model I had photos of named Anette Kellendonk, aka Anette K. And in looking her up on Google for that link, it’s only now that I’m seeing, twenty years later, that her name is spelt with one N and two Es, so… lawsuit bullet dodged.

There’s three versions of Annett that I’ve created: the Mk.III is the one you’ve seen in the illo linked above that looks arguably the most Organik; the Mk.I looks like an updated version of die Maschinenmensch Maria from ‘Metropolis’, and the Mk.II, my personal favourite, is somewhere in between, having artificial skin with exposed mechanical joints. They’re mass-produced by Deafening Silence Robotics, the (unfortunately) fictional company that my lasses and I are executives of. And they’re my original characters, meaning that if anyone with the artistic skill to do so would like to draw them in whatever situation, they can!
As of this writing, I’m in the midst of having a friend of mine work on not only the reference sheet layouts of all three versions of Annett, but the standard issue uniform that they wear as well; once that’s done, they’ll be uploaded into a Google Drive folder, so if anyone wants to have a go at drawing an Annett Mk.II holding a Corgi, or maybe a Mk.I getting an autograph from die Maschinenmensch Maria, or etc, then by all means!

In the meantime, you’ll find all the pieces I’ve had of the various Annetts drawn so far interspersed chronologically within Galerie ECHO. Not only will you find art by the usual suspects such as Yaruku and Sthev, but new and equally talented collaborators such as CartesianCoordinator and Amondetauro as well. Will YOUR art of (the) Annett(s) — man, that’s confusing — be amongst them as well?? I mean, eventually and not right this second?! Send me an Email, and find out!!

N.B: I should also add that the addition of these new illustrations makes Galerie ECHO more NSFW than ever before! Under normal circumstances, the Annetts are semi-autonomous drones, so they literally do not care if they’re clothed or not. That’ll be another aspect to add to the backstory I’m developing for them, already in progress

Random similar posts, for more timewasting:

Grrr on August 30th, 2005

'And I got more hits than Sadaharu Oh' on January 17th, 2013

2 have spoken to “Annetts! As many as you can carry!”

  1. Jam writes:

    When do we get the life update post??

  2. Davecat writes:

    Holy craps! First of all, not only am I genuinely pleased that you’ve left a comment, I am also genuinely surprised that anyone’s left a comment. In the Age of Social Media, having a blog is a bit like saying ‘well, I only watch films on VHS tape’. So thanks! 🙂

    I do have to get to that life update post eventually, before more life happens. As I’ve been furloughed from my job until late July, it’s not as if I don’t have the time to do so! (See, that was a spoiler for the life update post right there.) But perhaps now that I know someone is keen on reading it, that may well light a fire under my arse to at least get started on it!…

    Also on my to-do list: look into getting a new hit counter, as that shit’s been broken for literally years.
    Thanks for visiting ‘Shouting to hear the echoes’, ha ha!

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