There Are Only So Many Combinations Available.

In today’s daily doodle, President William McKinley wishes he had a Nintendo Game Boy.

I’d recently come to the conclusion that I needed to do more regular artwork to keep the brain juices going, even if only one quick doodle per day.  To this end, I began privately doodling some of my friends’ Twitter userpics.

I’d done a few and realized that the best thing to do with my growing collection of userpic doodles would be to start posting them on their own dedicated Twitter account, and throw the general Twitter public into the mix.  Hence, twitter.com/RobDrawsYourPic.

Now friends, acquaintances, luminaries, and total strangers are all finding themselves receiving my unsolicited mutations of their avatars, and I’ve even fulfilled some requests.  It’s a good excuse to not only get some sort of drawing done every day, but to try out some different styles.

So far folks on the tweetybirds seem to be digging it, or at least taking it in stride.  A couple of people have even changed their userpic to my version, which is entirely wild.  I’m sure I’ll creep someone out eventually, though.

Images are scaled down here; hit twitter.com/RobDrawsYourPic and the subjects’ Twitter accounts for the bigger versions.  Original userpics remain the property of their owners.

K2 Red Telephone Box 1926

The noble Red Telephone Box is a British institution, inspiring warm thoughts and a distinctively British style across the generations.   Britain's very first red booth design was the cast-iron K2, which very quickly became ubiquitous throughout London and the surrounding areas throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Britain’s Red Telephone Boxes continued to take inspiration from the K2 throughout the entire payphone era, and copies and tributes to the design can still be found in phone booths around the world today.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

Stromberg-Carlson upright phone 1894

When Alexander Graham Bell’s patent on the telephone expired in 1894, American Bell Telephone Company employees Alfred Stromberg and Androv Carlson went into the telephone-manufacturing business for themselves.

The telephone shown here is Stromberg-Carlson’s first upright desk phone, nicknamed "the Coffee Grinder" by enthusiasts due to its unusual shape and side-mounted hand crank.  Few of these unique members of the "candlestick phone" family survive today.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

I subtly altered a scene from the Blake's 7 episode "Bounty."  I wonder if you can spot what I changed.

Joan Clarke June 24, 1917 – September 4, 1996

Working alongside Alan Turing and other codebreakers at England's famous Bletchley Park during World War II, Joan Clarke was considered among the most brilliant mathematicians on staff.

She faced many hurdles in her career due to her gender.  One famous example of this occurred when, as no suitable senior codebreaking position existed at Bletchley to which a female was allowed to be promoted, she was granted the title of "linguist" to grant her some measure of recognition for her work.  Clarke, who spoke no second language, would later recall with bemusement filling out paperwork with "grade: linguist, languages: none."

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

My current business card.  The design was slightly accidental; I was playing with some vintage photos of my ancestors to pass the time while trying to come up with a new business card design, when I realized the distraction I'd been fooling around with would be just the thing to use.  It's a bit more "me" than my previous business cards.  I'd like to think my late great-grandparents would approve.

Background skyline is adapted from this public domain image.

Printed on 3x2" cardstock, with glossy coating on the front and rounded corners.  The reverse is blank, the better for writing any additional information the situation may require.  The cards are also quite useful for getting old food out from between one's teeth, though I always make sure to not use my relatives' corners for that.

I was screwing around with the Doctor Who Red Nose Day special short "Space/Time" (see those first if you haven't) and this accidentally happened.

Doctor Who ©BBC.

Some more captchart.  The 1963 Wostro, the herpderpiest automobile the swinging sixties and a wonky captcha had to offer!

Public domain source images: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Sharp J-SH04 2001

Manufactured by Sharp for the J-Phone brand, the J-SH04 is generally recognized as the world’s first camera phone.

The J-SH04 innovatively integrated a mobile phone and digital camera, devices many people of the day regularly kept on-hand, into a single unit with the camera functionality integrated into the phone itself.   For the first time, users could use a single device to take digital photos (at a then-impressive 0.11 megapixels) and share them via the mobile network.

The device (and photo-sharing in general) took off among young users and set the model for all future camera phones, devices which forever changed how we take and share photos and document our world.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.