Neo Violet

Flash as a drawing tool.

Northern California Violet

Vanilla Transhuman

The idea for this image came from the movie Vanilla Sky. The main character is in love with two women, and at one point he can no longer tell them apart in his mind. I morphed the two actresses together to see what they might look like as one.

Can you imagine a near future in which human cloning is possible, with celebrity fans who want to DNA-splice their children with somebody famous? You can actually copyright your DNA but I don’t think its clear what would happen if someone was cloned against their will.

This work dates back to Summer 2003.

The Philip K. Dick portraits incorporate the phenomenon of light. If you look at the animation long enough you should see interesting retinal effects. The Flash wave effect is called a moiré pattern.

Memes – based on a photo never taken

Philip K. Dick was a science fiction writer, best known today as the inspiration behind movies like "Blade Runner", "Minority Report", "Paycheck" and "A Scanner Darkly". These images date back to Spring of 2004 and are posted here for the first time.

Update: The animation was newly coded. Version 2.1 is scaled down to a smaller size because the version first posted here was consuming too much bandwidth.

Cell phone photo before and after digital processing

Somewhere in cyberspace sites like Google and Technorati are cacheing these words in "digital stone". However, this is the artist at work. And I’m not finished with this post yet.

It started with a cell phone photo taken at Laughing Squid Decade 2, where Anita Cocktail and the Twilight Vixen Revue entertained the crowd. Cell phone cameras are cool because they fit in your pocket, and you’re taking your cell phone with you anyway, right? Mine can even Bluetooth images over to a computer. But, the pictures aren’t that good.

Sin City and The Matrix visual metaphors

See another eWarrior portrait on Mac’s blog.

A 3D femail figure in self-defense stance

This is a Poser project I was working on before I got too involved with the site re-design. I think the virtual muscular structure is pretty good, but there are obvious contortions when the figure does something athletic. In the spirit of this blog, I’m posting it now, as-is.

Hand with leopard skin texture

Note the animal skin and claw-like hand. Science has been talking about the possibility of “designer babies” in the near future, through genetic manipulation. What I am curious about is whether people will do the kind of genetic cross-breeding depicted here, as a fashion statement.

Digital sketching Fall 2006

This sketch was created using a digital stylus. I had the opportunity to work with this model about a year ago. Her hair style is long on the right, and cropped short (as you see it here) on the left.

The sitting lasted about 20 minutes, and I felt that I didn’t have enough time to finish. Ordinarily, an artist would simply have the model back another time. But, this was done at a drawing class, and you are viewing it on the Internet. Sometimes you are going to see unfinished work in this space. You can take it or leave it. That’s what this blog is about.

Same model sketched previous year

When I sketched the model last year, I had just started drawing with digital pen. At that time, it was all about learning to draw with a plastic pen-tip on a plastic surface. Plus learning how to use the software.

Going forward, this blog has been upgraded to enable online discussions. Please register and sign-in to make a comment. Don’t post anything here that shouldn’t be public. Be nice.

Two computer OS’s running two Web browsers each

Here you see the new blog design for this site in progress. Rather than take sides in the so-called “browser wars”, it’s best to surrender to the fact that one can never win that argument, but only stir up resentment. So, the front-end is being tested under Mac and Windows, running Firefox, Safari and IE. The UI is implemented using only CSS and DIV tags, no TABLES, however, I am not convinced that is the only solution.

The back-end is now powered by WordPress, providing category tags, user comments and RSS feeds. WordPress is a “classic” Web 2.0 app, based on PHP and MySQL, but don’t let that stop you if you’re interested in creating a blog, because it is actually very easy to install and use. (You don’t have to design your own theme, like I did.)

Tech geeks recognize that half of these are server-side issues, and what really counts is how it looks on your own computer, client side. The blog is being re-launched with the “quick & dirty” version of its own blog theme. That means the “look & feel” will be refined over time. If you have a recent Flash Player and Javascript enabled everything should to pretty much work without a hitch. Bug reports welcome.

Mother Earth amid rising sea level

This is a representation of the mythical Mother Earth, or Gaia as she is sometimes called. Her hands in the clouds and legs in the water show the hydrological cycle. Her body is the color of arctic ice, ranging from white to deep blue. On her person you can see a human hand brushing the surface of the water. Those are typical Northern California hills in the background, and it appears that the water line is rising.

If you enjoyed the movie An Inconvenient Truth and are interested in areas susceptible to global warming, you can view dynamic maps created about climate change and sea level.

Digital charcoal and watercolor

It is a rare treat to be working with digital stylus in Silicon Valley. At the last sketching class I went to, I met a guy who was working on the beta version of Painter 10. You might think he was working on a computer as well, but no, he was there with sketchpad.