This one was originally conceived as a thank-you for a friend who loaned me a dollar to get a Winnie-teh-Pooh cell-phone charm from a Gatchapon machine.  She'll get one of the first prints, because her desk at work doesn't have enough happy stuff.  I used this as an excuse to put my steam-powered librarian idea to use.


One of the things I thought about quite a bit while designing the cart was the handle.  In the original line drawing, it just had two straight handles, like a wheelbarrow. I decided that would be too cumbersome even for a robot, and awkward to draw if I wanted to picture him, say, waving at someone.

That problem would actually occur to a kid like I was.  He'd immediately think "How can he still pull it by one handle?" and it would continue to bother me every time my mom or dad would get to that part in the story.  I'd obsess about how hard it would be to keep the cart from just going around in a circle, pulling it by just one handle.

So I put in a crossbar in between the ends.  I also added the little bell with a leather holder, so people can hear him coming when appropriate (like an ice-cream truck!) but also keep it quiet when he wants to.


I also put thought into the idea of a steam engine in such close proximity to a wooden cart filled with dry paper.  I decided that he doesn't actually have a fire burning in his belly.  Instead, he has a continuous energy reaction that doesn't necessarily require a steam-drive, but it's more efficient that way.  He's basically a hybrid, I guess you could say.  If he needed to, say, be really quiet, he can turn off the steam works entirely, but that would deplete his energy source more quickly, and the little puffs of steam aren't enough to even worry about making the books damp (yeah, I thought of that too), but he looks cute with little puffs of steam coming out of his stack.

I like the idea of a little guy roving around the countryside with his wagon full of books, lending and delivering with his stack steaming merrily, clanking along and waving to people in the fields.  

Materials:  Mech pencil, Sakura micron pens, Tombow brush pens, colored pencils, photocopier, Corel Painter Essentials 2