The M-Bot Sticker You Never Knew You Needed is Here!

Brandon’s art director Isaac here. My ten-year old daughter—nicknamed “W”—has been reading Skyward in preparation for the release of Starsight on November 26th. She’s read plenty of books before, but this is the first time I’ve seen her dive into something this hefty. Of course, I’m terribly proud of her for reading a book that’s over 500 pages.

W is also an artist with an innate sense for drawing all things cute. She’s watched over the last few months as our Doomslug and Pattern designs have gained popularity, and she’s fallen in love with M-Bot—like many of us have—reading Skyward. So she approached me, a bit of righteous indignation in her attitude, and asked, “M-Bot is awesome. Why doesn’t he have a sticker?”

Scud. She was right. This is something we at Dragonsteel have been talking about for over a year. The problem is time. I explained this to W, that there are a lot of designs we would like to make for stickers and t-shirts, but there just isn’t time to get to all of them.

So she decided to do it herself. She drew a picture of M-Bot.

Then she asked me to take a picture of it so she could ink and color it on the iPad. When W finished, she showed her M-Bot sticker to me.

“Can we make this into a sticker?” she asked.

“That is incredible, W,” I said. “We can definitely make it into a sticker. Do you mind if I fix the perspective a bit?”

She didn’t mind, but when it took longer than a day for me to get around to it, W came to me with the iPad on a Monday night and said, “We’re fixing the sticker right now.”

So we spent the evening working on M-Bot. I fixed the perspective and inked it. Then W took the iPad back to make sure that we were using her original color pallete, so most of the colors are her choice too, including the banana-cream yellow outline, which I actually kind of like. (One of the artists I identify with most—Van Gogh; yes, I know, scary—LOVED yellow. Me…not so much.)

I showed Ben McSweeney, who designed M-Bot for the schematics found in the books, and he said, “You gonna pay the kid?”

It was a good suggestion. I asked W if she wanted to get paid; she hadn’t considered that part before. After thinking about it, she told me what she expected in return for Dragonsteel to use her design. Her demands were reasonable.

When I showed Brandon the M-Bot sticker design at our weekly art review, I didn’t even have to ask him about paying W. He basically asked the same thing Ben had, “Are we going to pay her?”

So I listed W’s expectations. “She wants to be paid in Barbie dolls.”

After getting the thumbs up from Brandon and Emily, W showed me the Barbie she’s been wanting for awhile, and Dragonsteel ordered it. (I should’ve asked W to invoice me like I do with all the other artists I work with. Maybe next time.) Two days later, W’s payment arrived in the mail.

And a few days after that, the stickers arrived!

These will be available at the Starsight release party on November 26th at the Dragonsteel booth. Or, if you can’t make it to the party, we’ll be adding a sticker to every order in December, so when you order from the store, make sure to request which sticker you want.

I hope you’ll be able to make it to the release and get to ooh and ah over W’s artwork.