Digital Portrait Of A Woman Named Courtney I Used To Know, Done In August 2005 With A Smallish Camera

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

So I’ve missed a few days of daily doodles.  Sue me! :-D  Life happens, and I’ve chosen not to let slipping on my own self-imposed challenge bother me.  I’ll just do my best to pick it up again.

I drew this at a bar. It doesn’t represent anyone in particular, just this freaking guy.

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.

Grace Hopper (December 9, 1906-January 1, 1992)

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, USN, Ph.D., or "Amazing Grace" as she is often known to her admirers, was a computer scientist and programmer whose pioneering work on early computers as well as her amiably no-nonsense attitude when teaching continues to inspire.

She is known for distributing "nanoseconds," lengths of wire spanning the distance light travels in that amount of time, at her speaking engagements.

Acrylic on canvas, 7x5″.  From my September 2015 set Luminaries of the Hacker World.

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.

Nikola Tesla (July 10, 1856-January 7, 1943)

Tesla, a Serbian-American inventor never fully appreciated in his own lifetime, has in retrospect become known as one of the most important inventors on record. Much of our 21st -century technological environment has its roots in Tesla's work with electricity, radio, and more.

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

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.

This is a digital painting of Mrs. Ho, the Cook from the wonderful film Clue.  Mrs. Ho was played by Kellye Nakahara, and her only line of dialogue is represented here.

I scratched this out with the classic/modelling brush in MyPaint.

A fun little fandom meme I filled in bit by bit on breaks over the course of a busy day.  I generally try to fill things like this in by doodling as rapidly as possible with minimal erasing or undoing.

I was pointed toward this meme by my friend and fellow Doctor Who fan aikainkauna.  The original blank meme is by neekaneeks on Deviantart.

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.