A Dramatic Reading I Performed From The LiveJournal My Old Friend Murd0c used To Have, As Originally

drawadinosaurday:

This Raptor-flavored spoof of The Scream started as a silly doodle, and ended up a full-blown digital painting.  This was a lot of fun to do, thanks to all at DADD for the occasion!

I'm rather proud of this.  It's an entirely digital painting, done on a graphics tablet in Jasc Paint Shop Pro with a few original versions of The Scream and a toy velociraptor as reference.  This was "painted" using only the Paint Brush and Smudge tools, and the Dropper tool was used to pick up colors from one of the originals.

No filters or anything like that were used, what you see is what I got manually.

Happy (slightly belated) Draw a Dinosaur Day!

These logos for fictional trendy Web 2.0 sites were made for the latest episode of The Media Show.  The show called for a bunch of silly but real-sounding website names which were generated in the manner in which we write many of the show's greatest jokes; blurting increasingly random things back and forth at each other on filming day until we've all hopelessly dissolved into fits of convulsive giggling.  I then whipped up suitably shiny icons to match.

"Toop" is pronounced "taupe" because of course it is.

Motorola MicroTAC 9800X 1989

The MicroTAC 9800X was not only the smallest and lightest mobile phone of its time, it was the first to feature the trend-setting "clamshell" type design where a mouthpiece flipped to cover the keypad when not in use.

Featuring a dot-matrix LED display, very advanced for the day, the MicroTAC and its immediate variants remained in production well into the 1990s and formed the basis for much of the world’s idea of what a "cellular phone" looked like.

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

Mojave Phone Booth 196?-2000

In the late 1990s, certain corners of the Internet took notice of a strange anomaly in California’s Mojave desert: a lone phone booth, miles from civilization. The Mojave Phone Booth developed a strong following among telecom enthusiasts, phone phreaks, and other fans of odd cultural artifacts.  People called the booth for days on end hoping to talk to strangers wandering the desert, and pilgrimages to the booth itself became increasingly common.

The National Park Service, bothered by the effect of growing numbers of visiting telephone fans, eventually had the booth removed.  Its legacy lives on, with the booth and its story inspiring literature, film, and music as well as the continuing exchange of fond memories.

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my series of paintings of historical telephones.

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.

I got another amusing CAPTCHA and drew some CAPTCHArt around it.

Hello!  I've been painstakingly replicating the TARDIS Key as used by the Eighth and Seventh Doctors in the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie.  Now you can buy a 3D print of it or, if you have access to the proper gear, download my file for free and print your own.

The key prop used in the film was an official TARDIS key replica available at the time from 800-Trekker, a now-long-defunct scifi memorabilia catalog, under license from the BBC in the early 1990s. The 800-Trekker key was a unique design largely based on TARDIS keys used on-screen by the Third and Fourth Doctors in the 1970s, but with many noticeable differences from those TV props. Rather than design a new TARDIS key for the 1996 film, the film's prop department just bought a supply of those keys from 800-Trekker and made them the canonical key design used by the Seventh and Eighth Doctors in their movie.

The newly-canonical 800-Trekker keys became very popular with fans, but had already been out of production and in limited supply by the film's release. They were also made of a very soft pewter which scratched and bent easily, so very few good copies of the Trekker key remain in circulation today. I happen to own one of the Trekker keys, ordered myself from the catalog around 20 years ago. Armed with calipers, 3D software, and a desire to replace my prop (which has begun to show noticeable wear, despite my best efforts to preserve it) with something more durable, I modelled this key based on it.

So, you can now order 3D prints of this key in a variety of metals and plastics right here on my Shapeways shop.  (Shapeways, for those unfamiliar, 3D-prints users' designs in a variety of materials on industrial-grade printers.)  What's more, if you have your own access to 3D-printing gear (or you'd just like the 3D source file to play with) I'm sharing that file freely here on Thingiverse so you can hack and print it yourself.

Add a wire loop and chain to wear your key in style, or just hide it in a cubbyhole above your TARDIS door.

Thanks for looking!  Please feel free to ask any questions you may have.

Motorola DynaTAC 8000x 1983

The Motorola DynaTAC series was the first commercially-available, completely-handheld cellular phone.  A full charge of the brick-style phone's battery took ten hours, and offered half an hour of talk time.

The phone has since become iconic to the 1980s in general, and Yuppies in particular.  DynaTACs are used by characters of privilege in productions such as Wall Street, Saved By the Bell, and American Psycho.

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

Some days you find yourself illustrating venerable Irish actor and Star Trek alumnus Colm Meaney, and affixing him to an ancient meme.

Today, for me, is one of those days.

Modified from this original Keep Calm poster.