Daniel Isles, who works under the pen name DirtyRobot, is a British illustrator and comic artist based in Hokkaido, Japan.,,,He draws characters in pencil and ink before adding color and texture digitally, placing them in futuristic, cyberpunk-inflected worlds that blend Eastern and Western influences to tell a story or capture a moment in time.,,,,
Isles grew up in Birmingham, England, where he began drawing as a child and made his first comic, a remake of Robocop, at age nine.His mother encouraged him to enroll in college to study Art & Design, setting him toward a career in art.After the streetwear brand he had run folded in the mid-2000s, he turned to illustration full time and coined the name DirtyRobot, describing himself at the time as “an easily programmed, biological robot”.In the years that followed he took part in the #365project, drawing a new piece every day for a year, which grew his following from around 300 to more than 130,000.,
Isles has worked for clients including Yamaha, Capcom, and Jamla Records, and exhibited alongside the manga artist Yumiko Igarashi, creator of Candy Candy.His illustrations have also been licensed as physical works, among them the VOID Create and VOID Destroy vinyl toys for Kidrobot and the Jet Set Radio print made for Cook & Becker in 2018.,,His work appeared in the group exhibitions “Vanguard Invitational Group Show” in 2019 and “Alfred Liu, Dirty Robot & Melissa Grisancich” in 2020, both at Outré Gallery in Melbourne.
Isles joined SuperRare in January 2021 and that year contributed artwork to Ether Cards' Founder Series NFT collection, alongside artists including Anthony D'Onofrio and Nusi Quero.,In March 2022 he released The Art of Seasons, a collection of illustrations depicting the four seasons that sold out. That summer he airdropped Art of Seasons holders mysterious Black Box NFTs that could be burned for a piece from a new collection, Renga, a 10,000-piece project he launched in June 2022 and named after a Japanese poetic form in which poets take turns adding stanzas to build a longer poem.In November 2023 Isles contributed a piece to Perpetuals: Beginnings, a Bitcoin Ordinals collaboration in which Quadrillion Art brought together 21 artists to create 24 works, each minted for around $210 in Bitcoin.
