Steampunk is a genre that celebrates Victorian-era style mechanical machinery powered by steam. If you ever watched the films City of the Lost Children or Wild Wild West you'll know exactly what steampunk is all about. Beau Donnan, a mechanical engineer by trade, shared his highly mechanized high-school steampunk sketches on his Flickr feed. Intrigued by the detail, I was led to his collection of Lego steampunk machinery masterpieces created from the vision of those very sketches. It always amazes me to see how powerful sketching can be. How doing so can bridge the gap between the ideas in our head to fully-realized physical creations.

Lee Sankey, may I be blunt? Your science fiction sketches are freaking bad ass. The countless lines that fill every bit of the page. Vehicles that defy gravity and our common sense. Dystopian cities ruled by a merciless ruler. Gadgets that ignite our senses. Stories told behind dizzyingly-tall buildings…

This is all making my brain spasm, and to think you doodled these while on the phone as a call centre agent is simply mind boggling.

Elena Lombardi is one of my favourite names to say. It rolls off my tongue much like the lyrics of a Hanson song do. Mmmbop (maybe that reference won't cross cultural and generational gaps, but trust me, it means nice things).

Luckily I get to say her name a lot because Elena Lombardi is always producing spunky designs for me to look at and play with. With her pals at Helpful Strangers she created the cute learning game Simple Machines. Making science class not just bearable, but a good time... yes please!

She also doodles a lot. And today she's sharing her fineliner handiwork with us, in response to some silly questions I asked her about aliens and the ultimate pair of kicks.

So while I sit in the corner and say her name like its a hypnotic drum beat, please enjoy this playful interview with Elena Lombardi! Elena Lombardi, elena lombardi...