Edward Barnett

Missed doing yesterday’s daily doodle post because the migraine I’ve spent today with was coming on.  So, today’s daily post is inspired by the migraine which is still, as of this writing, in progress.

I look forward to seeing what it looks like once I can turn my monitor brightness back up to full again.

Steve Wozniak (b. August 11, 1950)

The old-school hacker and phone phreak known as "Woz" is celebrated worldwide for his co-founding of Apple Computer, his pioneering achievements in the hardware field, his work with the EFF, his love of pranks and good humor, his enduring hacker spirit, and - in some circles - his dancing ability.

Acrylic on canvas, 5x7″.  From my September 2015 set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

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.

A fascinating fact about the latest Doctor Who trailer.

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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.

I multitrack a capella'd "Tom's Diner."

I'm your Suzanne Vega now.

This also exists on Soundcloud.

Over on Twitter, patrickfedo has been organizing a neat Ghostbusters fan-art collaboration.  I'm pitching in with this pic of one of my favorite ghosts from the series, the taxi-driving ghost from the first film.

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.

I could explain that this is a photo of Walt, my character in the surreal dark comedy theatrical musical Aisle Six, who long ago had Hondo the hand puppet as his best friend and co-conspirator in mischief such as trying out the toilets at Home Depot, and this image was among those used in the show during a flashback slideshow of Hondo explaining his and Walt's storied past.

I could justify posting this to my art blog by pointing out that I did a serviceable photo manipulation job; at the photocall I was actually seated in front of a plain wall on a plastic chair.

I could reinforce this picture's value as a portfolio piece by pointing out the fact that I sourced a copyright-free public domain image to use as the background, so as not to cause the production any potential problems or costs.  I could then invite the viewer to hunt down and examine the aspects of the original I had to manipulate to get a usable background.

But I won't do any of that.  Instead, I'll just announce that this will probably be the most awesome photo I'll ever appear in and leave it here.

Callie and Izzy is an upcoming webseries it’s been my pleasure to be part of.  The show is by Nicola Rose, with whom I’ve previously worked on The Media Show and the musical Aisle Six.

More info coming soon, keep an eye on it!