This Is A New Variant Of Scrabble I'm Working On Which Is Fairly Mean To Its Players.  Rare Letters

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 liked basing a drawing on the userpic of my 400th Twitter follwer so much that I decided to make it a habit for every hundredth follower after that.  Here's a fifteen-minute sketch of my 500th follower, who just happens to be my old pal @jayeennenn.  Jenn's an old-school telephone enthusiast like myself, among other things she archives old telephone company recordings, so I dug up the last telephone book left in my house and doodled her on the telephone page.

I must point out that Jenn is more attractive than her userpic or this sketch of her userpic would suggest.  I'd snark at her extreme-eyeball-close-up avatar and tell her to go back to MySpace with that stuff but, well..

Ballpoint pen on telephone book page, 9.75x6.5".

The Fifth of November, 1955

Remember, remember the Fifth of November, The scientist hanging a clock, Who knew on that date, That fortune and fate, Would reveal so much more to the Doc. Doc Brown, Doc Brown, he did invent Such objects of folly, with good intent, He tumbled and fell in his lavatory But soon after took to his lab'ratory For though he'd been woefully injur'ed A vision unfurled in his bruis'ed head Great Scott! Great Scott! From this disaster Great Scott! Great Scott! The Flux Capac'tor! And what did he do with it? Build it!

Archival ink on paper, 6x8". The original drawing is now owned by a private collector. I've also done a reading of this poem on YouTube.

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.

Edward Snowden (b. June 21, 1983)

Technical expert Edward Snowden once felt something to which he had access contained evidence of something he felt was deeply wrong, in a way the public had a right to know about.  The echoes of his actions continue on the world stage, and have left him exiled with no current possibility of fair trial.

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

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.

A rough Doctor Who sketch from 2000 or 2001, done to stave off the boredom of the retail job I had back then.  I wasn't allowed to nap, so the Doctor got to instead.

I sketched this clandestinely behind the store's counter in black ballpoint.  This scan is color-corrected to counteract the old cheap ink having gone a bit violet over the years.  Around 9x6".

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’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 contribution to the Ghostbusters collab, now slowly being released at whoyougonnacollab.  I'm in some insanely brilliant company here, everyone's contributions are great!

I’m in a hurry, so let’s not dawdle. @rob_t_firefly