Here are a pair of neo-cubist style icons I created for ForthMedia. The "ForthMedia" guy has been around for a while. Originally created in Flash, he has been re-done in Illustrator.

iBot “Contact Me” Icon

The “Contact Me” guy is wearing a headset, so he’s OK to drive in California. The new hands-free cell phone law goes into effect there on Tuesday. You can dial your phone, but you can’t lift it to your ear to have a conversation. Bizarrely enough, you can still text message for now, as long as you’re 18 or over. (Can you do that without looking?)

Note: These images are copyright ForthMedia, and used here by permission.

The eWarrior MiniPlayer is powered by ForthMedia design technology.

If you really want to amp up your Photoshop skills, then work through Derek Lea’s June 2008 cover article for Photoshop User magazine. He uses a layered, compositing approach to digital illustrating that produces really impressive results.

Derek’s Blog “There are times when I’m working that I feel like I’m getting away with something. How is it that I can try something cool, have it published, and get paid? I have no idea, but I got away with it again.”

Desktop wallpaper

Here I am working with my own source material, as I try out the techniques. You can zoom my artwork to see the whole thing. Here’s what it looks like on a computer desktop.

When I was a kid, I had a small art book with a picture of Picasso’s Three Musicians on the cover. The image was about the size you see on your computer screen. Maybe smaller.

When I unexpectedly came face to face with the real thing in a museum, I was stunned by its size and true colors. To read that the painting is so many tens of inches by so many hundreds of centimeters, doesn’t explain it. Look at your wall. It’s about that big.

Four books, four Olgas

Since I can seemingly never have enough books about Picasso, I can show you an example of how hard it is to figure out what artwork looks like, without actually standing in front of it.

This is a painting of Picasso’s wife, Olga. Just looking at my version (from four different books) I think I’ve made my point. You can’t tell what art looks like from books, or on the Internet.

Knowing the artist had the color ochre in his palette, you might decide one of the middle slices are right. But the blues are different. Knowing the artist was imitating the smooth-skinned, idealized beauties painted by Ingres, you might choose another.

Olga Picasso poses for her portrait

Working from this photograph, Picasso embraced technology. Early film cameras were becoming the must-have gadgets of the day.

The above was realized with Photoshop. Below is the digital model. Her dramatic pose defies gravity, but I think it works in its intended context.

Pose

I called this one jazzy because it reminded me of Matisse. It started out as a live sketch, that really celebrated the female figure, without being too overtly sexual.

Sketch - Los Gatos, 11-Feb-08

In this video Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek combine to create a new person. Start with two familiar faces and create someone vaguely familiar, who exists only in imagination.

»Now Playing on YouTube Cruz, Hayek : A Photo Never Taken

The La Gata video exposes the software foundation behind a digital media portrait that seems like someone you know.

The term “la Gata” is a tribute to these two Latina superstars. It’s a slang term that, loosely, means “female cat.” The proper Spanish word for cat is the masculine, “el Gato.”

The Making of La Gata

The La Gata painting and video were digitally produced using a variety popular software applicaitions running on ordinary computers.

Gwen Stefani goes from sad to happy in this morphed sequence. You can also see it on YouTube.

Gwen Stefani - A Range of Emotions

My ghost likes to travel so deep into your space.

Simply drag from The Artist at Work to the Now Playing window, bottom left, in iTunes.

Cydonut Matrix Animation

I created the Cydonut Matrix in the Spring of 2000. It was my first all-digital painting. I ended up making 100 different versions of the picture in this animation, to populate a photomosaic of about 1600 elements.

What I liked about the painting was that it drew upon the scientific notion of self-similarity on various scales of magnitude. Both the image and the individual picture elements were the same thing. So, it was scalable. That is probably why I made two prints, one Zoomed In and one Zoomed Out.

Living Space

I think artwork should be lived and worked with, as opposed to something seen in a museum or lobby some place. Here’s the Zoomed Out painting wedged into a recreation space.

Work Space

Over here the Zoomed In painting resides with some office and networking stuff. People ask, "Are your walls really yellow?" Yeah. Just those two.