Latest Posts by robtfirefly - Page 5

10-minute sketch: "HOW'D IT GET BURNED?"

Done while watching this clip on a loop in the corner of my screen.  Drawing this has made me crave a plate of nachos, slightly overdone with the cheese just a little bit burned.

chiaestevez:

I definitely put my faith in Blast Hardcheese. 

I made this remix at least 100 years ago, it never fails to make me happy that other folks keep circulating it, making it into videos like this, etc.  It's the reason I ended up choosing the domain SpaceMutiny.com for my music.

The Next HOPE conference badge, for which I did the graphics.

These badges didn't just grant admission to the conference, they served as fully functional and hackable tracking beacons for its Attendee Meta-Data project.  (There's a video explaining the basics here, and more hardcore hardware info from the extremely neighborly Travis Goodspeed here.)  After the electronics were laid out and finalized, I was given the badge files so I could scrawl like a madman all over graphically enhance them.

I used what space and resources I had to bring the badge in line with the conference's retrofuturistic design theme, while highlighting and playing with some of the text labels and gadgetry within.  I even snuck in a silly little detail only a few people ever found and called me out on; the grid above the arrow logo makes use of a method I came up with in elementary school for hiding messages in notebook sheets, and contains the conference's initials.

This is the first thing I ever made completely in Inkscape.

A pen-and-ink drawing of a candlestick phone.  My separate obsessions with telephones and the design sensibilities of the early 20th century work well together.

Felt pen on 2.5x3.5" bristol board.  Incidentally, this happens to be the first ACEO I ever made.

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.

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I originally made this for the desktop library on the New York City 2600 website I run with Grey, surprising her with it.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.

In the rootin'-tootin' Old Days of the World-Wide Web, it wasn't uncommon to see websites with notes that they were intended for viewing with one particular web browser or another.  "This site is best viewed on Blah."  "This site is enhanced for Blah Blah."  Say "Netscape Now!" to any Internet veteran; the longer and more pained their responding groan, the more old-school and worthy of your respect they are.

When I started building my first terrible late-1990s website, I took a different approach.  Visitors to my site were greeted with the message "This site is best viewed with a Browser."  Below that appeared the buttons shown here.

First commenter below to correctly name all the browser buttons I spoofed gets a free emoticon! Edit: Tottenkoph got it!  I was wondering if anyone would get Lynx.  I've also wondered exactly why Lynx even had its own graphical button.  Even ancient Internets make no damned sense.

My Mystery Science Theater 3000 computer monitor, circa 2003.

Materials:

Clunky old-school beige CRT monitor

Sharpie marker (black)

Desire to have all one's computer activity heckled

The t-shirt I designed for Off the Hook, the radio show of which I am part.

WBAI, the nonprofit community radio station which airs our show, must periodically run fundraising drives to keep the bills paid. This shirt has been exclusively available as a thank-you gift to listeners who donated to those drives during our show's broadcast.

Anyone you see wearing this shirt has either been amazingly generous in showing their support and keeping our show and station on the air, or attacked our supporter and stole their shirt.  Either way, that person's sense of style is unquestionable.

Photo © Grey Frequency

Digital illustration of the different TARDIS keys seen over the years on Doctor Who.

Multiple screenshots of each were used as reference material to ensure that even the bumps on the normal-key-style keys are locksmith-accurate.  I'm sort of a dork like that.

The background is this NASA photo, which was widely enjoyed by Who fandom as it resembles a real-life version of the show's "Crack in the Universe."  For extra giggles I drew the keychain in the shape of the Crack.

As my follower count on Twitter approached 400, I mentioned that it might be cool to do a drawing based on the Twitter icon of my 400th follower.  Number 400 turned out to be an affable fellow known as @cjp, whose icon was a small photo of himself.

It was then that I realized randomly receiving an unsolicited portrait from some dude off the Internet he'd just begun reading might be perceived as a bit creepy, so of course I went ahead as planned.  He seemed to take it well, and I've received no restraining orders.

Felt pen on paper, 9x6".

My Dragnet-flavored contribution to the "How do I shot web?" meme.

More info on the meme: SFW / NSFW

Digital portrait of a woman named Courtney I used to know, done in August 2005 with a smallish camera phone photo as reference.  Her hair was really those colors.

I didn't have a drawing tablet back then; all points and vectors were placed manually with a mouse.  That method, combined with the fact that I wasn't entirely comfortable doing vector-based art at that point, resulted in this being very slow work.

Also, OMG LENS FLARE!!!@#$%^&*

captchart:

ןɐnʇıɹıds Jamony

Submitted by robtfirefly

CAPTCHArt is a beautiful thing!  I made this one.  Source images were public domain photos from Wikimedia Commons.

The logo of the fictional Union Broadcasting System (UBS) television network, from the brilliant Sidney Lumet film Network.  Recreated using screenshots from the film.  I thought I might someday use this to make a microphone flag, or maybe some novelty press credentials.

If you haven't seen Network yet watch it ASAP, preferably without looking up any plot points or spoilers beforehand.  It's a requirement for membership in the human race.

"Bell Odyssey" - This phone-phreaking-themed parody of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" was written by RBCP for issue 39 of the Phone Losers of America zine, which was released on July 27, 1996. Thirteen years later to the day, I released my own performance of the song.

The release date was entirely coincidental; I randomly got the urge to record the old track, spent a few days putting it together, and just happened to finish and release it on July 27, 2009.  RBCP later informed me that it just happened to be the song's 13th anniversary.  I blame the ghost of David Bowie; he isn't dead of course, but that's certainly never stopped him before.

Soon after I posted this, my colleagues at Off the Hook surprised me by using it as the closing song on the July 29, 2009 episode while I was away from the show.  RADIO AIRPLAY!

The genuine phone company recordings used in this track came from ThisIsARecording.com.

This song is downloadable as an MP3 from PLA's songs page.

My "Save the Clock Tower" flyer prop replica from Back to the Future.

A couple versions of the actual canonical flyer prop, as used in the film's production, have been in general circulation for a long time; you can grab them and other free printable BTTF props here.  I had one on my wall for ages, but was never really satisfied with it.  It's filled with placeholder text, unreadable on-screen but nonsensical in real life, and certain other details don't ring true; there isn't a date on the newspaper's front page, for one thing.  So, I created a new flyer from scratch, correcting errors and replacing the filler text with original newsprint written by myself.

This was made without re-using anything directly from BTTF; even the photo is something I heavily 'shopped from this free one.  I wrote the article text with lots of nods to BTTF continuity as well as some other obscure references and in-jokes, friends' names, etc.  (There's a secret signature of mine hidden somewhere which isn't the "Rob Vincent, Dot Net" or "R.T.F. News Wire" bits, which nobody to my knowledge has found yet.  If you see it, contact me or leave it here in a comment and claim some geek points!)  If you wish to customize or replace the article text, the font is Times New Roman 18pt bold.

Printed up at 300 DPI on the right shade of pale blue paper, these result in a prop replica which I feel is a lot neater in real life than the genuine prop.  Alternately you could print it on white paper, photocopy it, copy the copy, and so on to soften the edges and approximate that 1980s multi-generational xerox look before finally getting it copied onto the blue paper.

There's still a bit of work to do on this before I'll consider it finished.  For one thing, I had to improvise the masthead text with a calligraphy font that isn't all that good a match if you look closely; if I can't find a closer font I'll have to remake the text from scratch someday.

These were a big hit when I dressed as the "Save the Clock Tower" lady for a Halloween parade.

2021 edit: Wow, this blew up. Nowadays around half of the Clock Tower Flyers for sale online by shady prop dealers are my version, which you can still get totally free here. If you paid anyone for a copy of this flyer, you were ripped off.

This did, however, lead to something nicer; my version was found by actual Back to the Future licensee Doctor Collector, who were impressed enough by my work on it that they negotiated my services to rewrite the news text from scratch once again for their authorized version of the prop which is part of their “Back to the Future Time Travel Memories” box of replica items from the BTTF universe. If you have that kit, which is full of so many very cool things any BTTF diehard would enjoy, you have an all-new and official version of this flyer which was written by me.

It wouldn’t have been cool on either of our ends for Doctor Collector to just reuse my free fan-art in their version and sell it, but through their very kind efforts at reaching out to me I found myself actually writing authorized BTTF-universe material. That’s an achievement I won’t soon forget.

In the interest of art-blogging something as quickly as possible which isn't my big ol' face, here's an illustration commissioned by Brad Carter for the Phone Losers of America book.  It's the first of three illustrations of mine appearing in the book, for which I also wrote the foreword.  You should probably go purchase a copy right now, before you've had time to think it over properly.

Archival inks on acid-free paper, 8x6".  Scan is low-res.

I've decided what to do with this Tumblr o'mine.

I already have a standard blog and a whole mess of other stuff.  The one type of blog I'd been thinking of starting but hadn't yet was a dedicated art blog.  So, that's what I shall do here.  I've been producing various things in various media all my life, and I now have this shiny new venue for it.  Woo and yay!

I begin this project with a simple digital self-portrait, inspired by the one Adrian Lamo uses as a logo in press releases he writes about himself in the third-person.  It was the first image ever created on my current graphics tablet, completed in about 30 minutes while looking at Lamo's pic and a small mirror for reference.