Way back in 1999, I was attempting to capture frames from a video file on a Playstation 1 disc; I no longer remember which game it was. The process of accessing video from a PS disc in a regular CD-ROM drive was unstable to begin with in those days, and it didn’t help that I really wasn’t sure what I was doing. Instead of grabbing usable screenshots from the video, my wonky software (which I seem to remember being in Japanese with no translation available) and wonkier settings generated four 320x224 bitmaps which, while unrecognizable, were surprisingly pretty.
I’ve been saving the images ever since, hoping to find something to do with them. I haven’t managed to find anything yet, so I stitched the four frames together into one image and am posting it here. Instead of using the Creative Commons License I normally apply to my work, I’m posting this graphic entirely public domain and free of any restriction in hopes that folks might get some sort of use out of this old accidental digital art.
Digital portrait of my best friend Grey Frequency, in the style of Shepard Fairey's OBEY. See what I did there?
I originally made this for the desktop library on the New York City 2600 website I run with Grey, surprising her with it. It quickly became my favorite thing to cause computers in public places to display. I heartily endorse your doing the same with it, especially if Grey is nearby.
A Joseph Ducreux-inspired painting I did because Christian Slater is awesome in Mr. Robot.
EDIT: Added an alternate caption suggested by spectralconfetti on reddit.
Painted with a Wacom Bamboo tablet in MyPaint, lettered in GIMP.
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.
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.
For today’s daily doodle I played a self-administered drawing game a teacher taught me ages ago which is perfect for getting over doodler’s block, so I decided to share the game here as well.
The original game used a paper encyclopedia or dictionary (which were things people had back then) flipped to a random page, I updated it for the Wikipedia era.
Once you master doing this in ten minutes, try for five!
A dramatic reading I performed from the LiveJournal my old friend Murd0c used to have, as originally posted by him on September 1, 2003. NSFW for sweariness.
Unfortunately the post I'm reading can no longer be seen; Murd0c deleted his LiveJournal because he didn't want a bunch of crap he wrote as a teenager still out there. I don't see what his damn problem is, this was some ace material.
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.
AISLE SIX - YOUR ONE-STOP SUPERMUSICAL by Nicola McEldowney
More info on the FREE April 11 reading of this show in New York City which you can FREELY attend for FREE can be found in this blog post.
More info on the show itself can be found on my site as well as the author's own page about the show.
If you're in the area, come see us!
I started playing with recording over my own voice in multitrack, and after about an hour and a half this accidentally happened.
If you're one of the poor unfortunate souls who haven't experienced the glorious original version, here's the video and here's the Wikipedia article. I put together these lyrics based on multiple English translations floating around out there; I think I've kept the basic gist of each line intact.
I have no regrets; if nothing else, at least I actually hit every sour note without pitch-bending or autotuning of any kind.
Download this track here if you're unwell enough to want to do such a thing.
There's a music video now as well.
I made this comic for /r/behindthegifs, a subreddit where the idea is to take a GIF that's going around and make a comic that tells what led up to it. I'm pretty happy with how this turned out after scratching it together at stupid o'clock in the morning.
Here's the Reddit post, and here's the Imgur gallery.
Drawn in MyPaint, lettered and laid out in GIMP.
Hello there. I'm Rob. This used to be my art blog until I left Tumblr; here's why you won't see me around here anymore. This is my website, you can find the rest of what I do from there. Here's a bunch of social media I do still use. Here's how to contact me directly if you wish, please feel free. All my original artwork posted on this Tumblr is released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Feel free to reuse, remix, etc. any of my stuff under the terms of this license.
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