iPad Art - Morgan Freeman Finger Painting

I'm genuinely surprised that there are still people who bring out the "iPads are for consuming content" trope.

On another note, this got me remembering something from my old art school days. The abstract expressionists, if I remember right, were all about boiling down a medium to the essence of that medium. The things unique to painting that make it essentially painting are paint and a canvas (and maybe a brush). They weren't keen on one medium emulating another, and as such, weren't into photorealistic painting. But here's Kyle Lambert taking it a step further, using a virtual canvas on a digital thing to emulate photography. Interesting stuff.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEdRLlqdgA4

FlySi!

FlySi Logo

Here’s a logo I made for my online moniker, using nothing but Illustrator and Photoshop. Maybe I’ll blog a little bit about how I made it another time, as I think a lot of people aren’t fully aware of Photoshop’s impressive 3D capabilities.

Project 365

Elias [8/365]It’s been a minute since my last post (or 146,044 minutes, according to Wolfram Alpha), but I just wanted to make a quick update to point you to my latest personal photographic endeavor. It’s called Project 365, and the basic premise is that you take a photograph every day for a year. There’s a dedicated site and community built around the idea, but I opted to go the Flickr route, where I created a set and joined a Project 365 group.

I’ve been having a ton of fun with this exercise, and I’ve also been learning about myself as a photographer. It forces discipline by making me shoot every day. Yes, I’ve often been caught at 11:50pm running to go and shoot a picture of my cat before midnight, but I still think that the quality of my photographs has gone up overall, simply because I don’t want to include crappy images in this project.

Wood Shingles - iPhone Wallpaper


Shingles

I spent the weekend up in the Catskills with my wife this weekend, and found myself snapping tons of pictures of all the wonderful country textures. This one of the wooden shingles that covered the side of the converted carriage house that our room was in, is my current iPhone wallpaper. I shot it with the iPhone 4’s camera, and tweaked it slightly with Tiffen’s Photo fx iPhone app. Feel free to grab it from my Flickr feed if you like.

Pro-tip: if doing a web search for images of shingles for comparison, be specific and search for “wood shingles”, not just “shingles” - unfortunately, Google’s fancy new image search doesn’t come with an “un-see” button.

Goodnight Brooklyn

Woodruff Ave, 6:06amJust a quick note to point you to my newest photo blog Goodnight Brooklyn. Early last year, for a photography class at ICP, I started a project which eventually evolved into night photography of different parts of Brooklyn, and this blog is my effort to keep the project going. The images that are currently up are older, as they’re part of the initial project, but I’m going to start including newer shots moving forward.

Robot Joe: One of 50 Awesome Robots on Abduzeedo

Robot Joe, 2006

Wow - this made my day: I discovered (rather late, I might add) that a 3D rendering of a robot that I did back in 2006 for a Maya class at SVA was featured on abduzeedo in a collection called 50 Awesome Robots. I consider this extremely high praise, because the caliber of artists featured on the site is always top-notch, and it’s humbling to be grouped among them.

Some fun facts about Robot Joe:

 

  • Robot Joe originated as vague idea I had for a video game back in the ’90s. See some early sketches here and here.
  • His current incarnation — and the name “Robot Joe” — is largely inspired by my friend and co-worker Joe (who happens to love robots)
  • Robot Joe is by far my most favorited and viewed image in my Flickr stream (13K views and counting)
  • He’s been widely used across the Internets (under Creative Commons licensing) for various purposes, including as a mascot for benderjab.org, as a desktop image in an eMINTS classroom, and on a website for a robotics conference workshop.