Drawadinosaurday:

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.

Alexander Graham Plane 1978

As the era of novelty telephones took hold in the 1970s, third-party phones of all shapes and gimmicks began finding their way into homes.   Most telephone companies were still discouraging the practice of customers connecting third-party phones to their lines, but interestingly-shaped phones caught on regardless.  Canadian phone company Northern Telecom addressed the issue with their own cute airplane-inspired phone.

The Alexander Graham Plane, part of Nortel's “Imagination” line of contemporary telephone designs, was one of very few novelty phones of the period to be actively manufactured and made available by a telco.

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

Sharp J-SH04 2001

Manufactured by Sharp for the J-Phone brand, the J-SH04 is generally recognized as the world’s first camera phone.

The J-SH04 innovatively integrated a mobile phone and digital camera, devices many people of the day regularly kept on-hand, into a single unit with the camera functionality integrated into the phone itself.   For the first time, users could use a single device to take digital photos (at a then-impressive 0.11 megapixels) and share them via the mobile network.

The device (and photo-sharing in general) took off among young users and set the model for all future camera phones, devices which forever changed how we take and share photos and document our world.

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

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".

This past Wednesday I volunteered to add something unique to the thank-you gifts we gave to Off the Hook listeners who pledged their support during our final fundraising episode of the season.  During the show I drew a series of telephones, all different, all off the hook, one after another in a live marathon.  Everyone who donated to WBAI during the show's live broadcast will be receiving a random one of these.

This was lots of fun.  I did better than I thought I might both time and quality wise, and the fundraising was successful with many awesome folks supporting our listener-funded exploits.

You can listen to the episode by going to this archive page and selecting the May 18, 2011 link.

Signed, dated, and numbered series. Archival ink on heavy paper, 7x10".

Studio photos by Mike, first-five photo by dot.ret

Trying out something a little different.  Here's my reading of the short humor essay "The Gusher" by Charles Battell Loomis, from the 1907 anthology The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX edited by Marshall Pinckney Wilder.

The President's Red Phone

The Moscow-Washington hotline which existed during the mid-20th-century Cold War was a teletype-based affair, not a telephone, but that didn't stop the imagined concept of a red emergency phone in the White House catching on in popular culture.  One example of this is the Red Phone's starring role in the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; indeed, the film's Spanish title is ¿Teléfono rojo?, volamos hacia Moscú, which means “Red Telephone?  We're Flying to Moscow.”

The iconic “Red Phone” image continues to grip the public imagination today, appearing regularly in fiction, art, and even Presidential campaign ads.

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

Konrad Zuse June 22, 1910 – December 18, 1995

In May, 1941 German inventor and civil engineer Konrad Zuse secured his place in computer history with his Turing-complete Z3, the world's first working programmable computer.

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

They have lots of new gTLDs you can put a website on nowadays.

I acquired ascii.bike and put an ASCII bike on it.

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.