You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Bitmap Graphic’ category.
When Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2022 I thought about creating a whole bunch of memes. I ended up creating just two so far. One was this meme of Vladimir Putin that I made last year when the Wagner Group started this civil war in Russia that ultimately lasted just a few hours. The other I created just last month.
It turned out that so many other people have created incredibly awesome memes that I just don’t feel the need to create them myself. But then it turned out that there was an incident that led me to create this meme.
Here’s some background. I first heard about Russell “Texas” Bentley when he appeared in this video that went viral just days after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Here was this guy in the Russian-occupied region of Ukraine who was making pro-Russian propaganda speaking English with a Texas accent. He originally recorded his video for his own YouTube channel. Once it went viral YouTube closed down his channel and banned him. However his viral video has been preserved on Reddit and Twitter/X.
I looked this guy up online and found that a few years earlier he did this interview for Texas Monthly where I learned that he was born into a wealthy family. He became interested in communism at 12 when he read a book on Che Guevara, he was a pothead as a teen, he dropped out of high school, worked a variety of jobs, joined the U.S. army for a few years, worked a variety of jobs, moved to Minnesota, ran for the Senate as a third party candidate and lost, sold marijuana, was arrested, was convicted, was sent to jail, broke out of jail, spent the next few years as a fugitive on the lam, was caught and sent back to prison, was released, moved back to Texas, became an arborist, traveled to Cuba where he was impressed by the communism there, and listened to Russian propaganda through RT America (back when it used to broadcast in America–RT America got shut down when several cable providers dropped the channel from their lineups soon after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine). He became convinced that Ukraine was run by Nazis so he decided to travel to the Donbass region to fight for Russia in order to help “denazify” Ukraine. He appeared in this Vice News story about his fight with a Russian unit in Donetsk.
He subsequently settled in Donetsk, and married a local Donetsk woman. He also switched from fighting in a military unit to making English-language propaganda on behalf of Russia, which led to his viral video. That video led to more profiles in Western publications like Newsweek and Rolling Stone. After his video went viral he lost his YouTube channel and a few other Western social media accounts and he seemed to fade from the Western media.
But he kept up with his propaganda work. There’s his Instagram account where he had posted pictures of his life in Donetsk but he hadn’t posted there since 2019. There’s his blog, which he hadn’t updated since 2020, where you get to read about things like his belief that the COVID-19 pandemic was a manufactured crisis. There’s also his Telegram channel, which contains his more recent writings until the day before he disappeared and was announced to be dead eleven days later.
The biggest irony is that he was thrown off of Twitter nine years ago, which was long before Elon Musk purchased that platform and began to reinstate previously banned accounts. For some reason Bentley’s account wasn’t reinstated but he was allowed to create a new account just a few weeks before he was killed.
There’s even a book that Bentley wrote called The Donbass Cowboy, which was based on his own experiences fighting for Russia in Ukraine.
He went on to work for the Russian state media outlet Sputnik. It was through his propaganda work that he became a local celebrity in Donetsk where the locals called him “Texas.” Most of the Russell Bentley videos that are still up on YouTube are ones where he made guest appearances on other people’s channels. One such video was where he gave a guided tour of his new hometown of Donetsk. It was the least political of the videos that he appeared in and it showed the tragedy that such a lovely city had to be caught in such a violent war.
After that video he made went viral I remember the outcry on social media from people—especially Americans—calling him a traitor and demanding that he should be hauled back to the U.S. to be tried for treason. My attitude at the time was that while I probably disagreed with about 80% (and maybe higher) of his political beliefs, I could at least respect him because he actually put his money where his mouth was and moved to Eastern Europe and he even obtained Russian citizenship.
My opinion of Russell “Texas” Bentley grew lower the following year when two Westerners who had been fighting for Ukraine when they were captured and imprisoned by Russia, Shaun Pinner and Cossack Gundi, alleged on Twitter/X that their captors had forced them to participate in propaganda videos that Bentley was making. Which meant that Bentley was a war criminal.
Bentley was last seen in Donetsk on April 8 after an attack on the city by Kyiv forces. Bentley and his wife, Lyudmila, had gone to an office in downtown Donetsk to deal with some administrative documents. At the same time there was a Ukrainian strike in that area. Bentley decided to go in the direction of the smoke looking for anyone who needed help. When Bentley didn’t return, his wife had gone looking for him. She found his car, which had his baseball cap, his glasses, and a broken phone. Lyudmila later posted on her husband’s Telegram channel that her husband had been abducted by the 5th Brigade of the Russian Federation Armed Forces. When people suggested that Bentley was kidnapped because he was filming something that he shouldn’t be filming, Lyudmila clarified that she had experts check his broken phone and there were no photos or videos that were recently shot.
Soon messages began to surface on other Telegram channels about Bentley was taken by this Russian brigade because they thought that he was a NATO spy. Then the story of his demise at the hands of this Russian brigade began to change. At first the reports said that he was beheaded. Then the reports claimed that he had been shot in the head eight times. Then the reports said that the Russians initially gang-raped him before someone discovered that he had a Russian passport and other official documents indicating that he really wasn’t a NATO spy and one of the officers said that it was no longer possible to let Bentley go so they killed him either by being tortured to death or he was shot (depending on which report you read).
The only thing all these reports have in common is that Russell “Texas” Bentley was killed at the hands of the same Russian forces that he had fought with and actively supported with making his pro-Russian propaganda. His body has yet to be found as of this writing. It’s highly unlikely that he’s still alive because he disappeared in an active war zone. He’s been gone since April 8 and this post has gone live on May 16 so he’s been gone for over a month.
Why would the Russians turn on him? I’ve read some posts on Twitter/X claiming that he was too much of an alcoholic to be much use as a propagandist, he’s a scammer, he’s a bullshit artist. It’s possible that he may have somehow pissed the wrong person off and he paid the ultimate price for it. I’ve also read posts saying that the two breakaway republics in the Donbass region have apparently been dominated by gangsters and thugs since Russia encouraged the Donbass region to breakaway from Ukraine. It’s probable that Bentley was murdered by them because they wanted a pack of cigarettes or the cash in his wallet or something else. But right now it’s all rumor and speculation so it’s hard to know what is true and what isn’t.
There’s another possible reason. The Daily Mail has a story about him that mentions one thing about his death that I didn’t know about before. Quoting another story in The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Mail claims that Bentley had been involved with Russian ultranationalist circles and his death has made him the latest in a number of leaders of the annexation of eastern Ukraine to show up dead. The ultranationalists had felt that Russia was not moving aggressively enough in its invasion of Ukraine.
This group also included the late Wagner PMC founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, who had a falling out with Vladimir Putin after he had the Wagner Group organize an attempted coup against Moscow last year that ultimately failed. Prigozhin died in a plane crash one month later. Since then a number of ultranationalists have fallen out of favor with Putin and many of them have turned up dead. Bentley was the latest ultranationalist to meet his demise.
He had indicated in interviews that he intended to spend the rest of his life in Donetsk. It looks like he got his wish.
The moral of the story of Russell “Texas” Bentley is if you’re an American or a Westerner, don’t ever fight on behalf of Russia because the Russians will turn on you for whatever reason and you could end up dead. I’ll end this post with this song that he “wrote” and performed called “Sweet Home Novorossiya,” where he basically ripped off the melody from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.”
UPDATE (May 18, 2024): When I first became aware of Russell “Texas” Bentley after his one video went viral in 2022, I did a Google search on the guy and I found this 2017 interview he did with Texas Monthly. That article was probably the most in-depth story I read about the guy because it went into details about his family background (mainly that his family was wealthy) and his life in the US before he moved to Donetsk. Recently the same writer, Sonia Smith, wrote a sequel that is in the most recent issue of Texas Monthly. The only thing about Bentley that’s really new is the report that in late April a white Niva was found near an abandoned brick factory close to the front line. Inside of the car was a burned body. That body is supposedly undergoing a forensic medical examination but nothing further had been released.
Even if that body belonged to someone else, the chances of Bentley still being alive are practically nil at this point. He disappeared from an active war zone a month-and-a-half ago without a trace. If he was simply being kidnapped and held hostage his captors would’ve released a photo or video of Bentley along with a list of demands a long time ago. The fact that it didn’t happen only further proves that Bentley is dead.
The only other new fact about Bentley that was in that article is that he was the subject of this new documentary that was completed shortly before he died. It will air on Al Jazeera in a few months.
This past weekend was a really bizarre turn in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. A civil war broke out in Russia and it ended in about 24 hours, which is probably the shortest civil war I’ve ever heard of. (In contrast, the American Civil War lasted four years.) Or maybe it was an attempted coup d’etat. Whatever it was, it came suddenly then ended just as suddenly.
In hindsight, you could say that the foundations were laid just a couple of months ago. Not only is the regular Russian military fighting in Ukraine but there is a special private military organization known as the Wagner Group whose leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was a chef who owned several restaurants and catering companies that provided services to the Kremlin and he was sometimes nicknamed “Putin’s chef.” That’s right, the man had radically changed careers from food to war.
The Wagner Group also has a history of committing atrocities in Ukraine and in other countries like Mali and Syria. Yesterday I actually made a Facebook post pointing out that fact when I saw posts from people who cheered on the Wagner Group challenging Vladimir Putin in that short-lived civil war. Yes, Vladimir Putin is an awful human being but so are Yevgeny Prigozhin and his entire Wagner Group. Just because the Wagner Group had put up a fight against the Kremlin doesn’t mean that they are virtuous heroes or the proverbial knights in shining armor. The people in the Wagner Group are just as awful as Putin so it makes no sense to even take any sides in this dispute.
A couple of months ago Prigozhin made this video calling for an end to the war in Ukraine, which briefly got some mention in the Western media then quickly forgotten.
Then last month Prigozhin made an even more blunt video where he’s standing in a field that’s full of dead Russian soldiers. He angrily challenged Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov for not providing enough ammunition so the soldiers in his group ended up dead. That anger-filled rant went viral for a few days.
But all hell literally broke loose when the Wagner Group decided to take their tanks and start traveling from Ukraine right into Russia where they began to take over a few border towns then decided to head towards Moscow. Social media was totally crazy with all kinds of reports of the tanks moving north to Moscow. There was speculation of whether Putin was going to be overthrown by the Wagner Group. There were even conflicting reports on what was going on. I found this timeline of events on Al Jazeera’s site that attempted to make sense of what was going on.
At one point I saw posts claiming that Vladimir Putin had decided to flee Moscow and head to St. Petersburg. I began to remember last year when Russia initially began its invasion of Ukraine and the US offered to help evacuating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy from Kyiv and he famously turned them down saying “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.” I decided to create this quick meme featuring a picture of Vladimir Putin right on my phone using InShot with the caption “I need a ride, not ammunition!”
I uploaded it on Twitter and Instagram and I got some notice. I decided to make a version for TikTok where I added the song “Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Hey, Hey, Goodbye!” as the background. I got a lot of views on that video along with a bunch of likes. I cross-posted it to YouTube Shorts where I got far less views.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything like a meme but I thought it was cool that I got attention and I hoped that it would go viral. That hope was short-lived because that Russian civil war turned out to last a little over 24 hours.
Basically Prigozhin had decided to call off the Wagner Group’s march into Moscow just as they were within a short distance of that city. In exchange Prigozhin would relocate to Belarus while Putin would remain in control of Russia. The whole thing was just totally bizarre and it had exposed Putin’s weaknesses.
So my own meme had quickly gone from being timely and relevant to not aging very well in less than 24 hours. I’m only glad that I didn’t spend too much time and money in making that meme since it became so quickly outdated.
That whole Russian Civil War (or coup d’etat or whatever) was just bizarre. The weirdest part of the whole thing was this video that was posted on the 1420 YouTube channel where local Moscow residents were interviewed while the Wagner Group tanks were making their way north to that city. (This was before Prigozhin called off the whole tanks moving in formation to Russia and made his decision to accept political asylum in Belarus.) The majority of people interviewed seemed incredibly calm and nonchalant about the fact that tanks were going towards their city while they were talking about why they weren’t worried about those tanks. The most jaw-dropping responses were the ones who said that they didn’t want to talk politics. That’s right, some people actually thought that talking about tanks approaching their city was “too political.”
I live outside of Washington, DC and I was there when one of the planes in the September 11 terrorist attacks hit the Pentagon. I remembered that people were incredibly sad, angry, and totally freaked out about what happened, especially those who lost friends and family members there. No one had any trepidation over discussing the 9/11 terror attacks as being “political.” I’d like to believe that had there been any tanks from a hostile enemy force that were making their way towards DC, the locals would either find a secure location to hide in, flee the area, or even attempt to mount some kind of a resistance. The DC locals definitely would not be totally blasé or nonchalant about enemy tanks trying to make their way to DC. And they would not be worrying about talking about the arriving tanks as “too political” to discuss.
I know the Russians had long been living under some kind of an authoritarian government since the time when the czars were in power. Just providing a very mild critique of the government could risk prison, forced exile, or death. Many of them have been conditioned to not be too outspoken about anything, especially if those views directly contradicted the official views from the government, and, in a lot of ways, having a detached point of view or living in denial is merely a survival mechanism. But I find it shocking that many of these people have taken their detached point of view/living in denial to the point where their potential safety could be endangered because they aren’t willing to directly face the reality of their situation.
UPDATE (July 1, 2023): I came across another video from the Real Ukraine YouTube Channel. Like the earlier 1420 video that I embedded in this blog post, the people behind this channel conducted their own interviews with the locals in Kyiv about the attempted Russian coup d’etat/revolution/whatever.
Compared to the Russians interviewed in the 1420 video, the Ukrainians in this particular video were more relaxed as they freely gave their opinions about that incident in Russia. It is a stark reminder of the vast difference between the people living in Russia and the people living in Ukraine in terms of being able to actually voicing their opinions without fear of being sent to prison.
By the way I created a short video compilation of some of the wackiest videos and photos from that short-lived rebellion/coup/whatever.
After ruling the United Kingdom for 70 years, Queen Elizabeth II has died today at the age of 96. For everyone who was born after 1952 (myself included), Queen Elizabeth was the only ruling British monarch that we have ever known.
On one of their last albums, Abbey Road, The Beatles recorded this short tribute to the queen called “Her Majesty.” At the time of that album’s release in 1969, Queen Elizabeth had only been on the throne for only 17 years.
I’d like to share a mixed-media piece that I did of the queen back in 2002, when she was celebrating her Golden Jubilee (for her 50-year reign).
Queen Elizabeth
Mixed media (ink and computer graphics)
9 inches x 12 inches (23 cm x 31 cm)
For the technical details on how I created this piece, you can read my original post that I wrote back in 2010. I still have memories of when I entered this piece in the 2002 Greenbelt Labor Day Arts Festival in Greenbelt, Maryland where it won Third Place in the “Best Mixed Media”. At the time I created this piece I wasn’t sure if the queen was going to be around much longer, which was one of the reasons why I decided to honor her Golden Jubilee. But she proved me wrong by living 20 years longer.
The earliest Queen Elizabeth anniversary I was aware of was her Silver Jubilee back in 1977. That was because, in the midst of the pageantry surrounding that momentous anniversary, The Sex Pistols came out with their notorious song “God Save the Queen.”
Queen Elizabeth picked an auspicious year to die because this year was also her Platinum Jubilee, which celebrated the 70th anniversary of her reign. Three months ago there was an official video released where she had tea with Paddington Bear. I’ll just end this post with that video since I feel that it’s the best way of remembering the memory of Queen Elizabeth II. (And that’s not to mention that this video is incredibly cute and funny.)
UPDATE (September 9, 2022): Just a few hours after I wrote my post, I decided to share my old mixed-media piece of Queen Elizabeth on a few social media sites. I even decided to create a short video slideshow of my piece where I paired it with The Beatles’ “Her Majesty” song. You can view it on TikTok, Clapper, Instagram, and YouTube.
Meanwhile I have a Queen Elizabeth story that I forgot to share last night (mainly because I wrote this post while I was half-exhausted). Way back in 2007 I was married to an employee at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He came home from work one day saying “You’re not going to believe who is visiting Goddard.” When he answered Queen Elizabeth, I was surprised. But, yes, Queen Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, actually paid a visit to Goddard towards the end of their visit to the U.S. to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement in Virginia.
I remember that my husband told me that the officials had to hold a lottery in order to determine which employees would actually be there to greet the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh (that’s mainly because that particular NASA campus is large with around 10,000 employees). My husband lost that lottery so he decided to take a half-day off from work on the day that the royal couple arrived because he didn’t want to deal with the more intense-than-usual traffic jams that stemmed from Elizabeth and Philip, their entourage, and the reporters from all of the major news media outlets. (That visit happened in the morning so my husband didn’t report to work until after lunchtime.) Yesterday’s NASA blog post had a photo of Queen Elizabeth greeting the NASA Goddard employees back in 2007.
It turned out that it wasn’t the only time that Queen Elizabeth had showed up in my local area. Back in 1957 she went to her first American football game with Prince Philip when she saw my future alma mater, the University of Maryland, defeat the University of North Carolina at a home game in College Park. Later that same day Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip decided to go to the nearby town of Hyattsville, where they visited their first American grocery store.
Unlike her visit to NASA Goddard, that earlier visit happened before I was born and I only learned about it yesterday when my friends were sharing links to old news stories on Facebook.
Last month a notable person was the latest victim to the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic. His name is Stephen Wilhite and he was 74 when he died on March 14, 2022. Many of you may not know his name but you are benefitting from an innovation he made when he was an employee of CompuServe back in the 1980s. He was the creator of the Graphical Interchange Format or GIF for short. If it weren’t for his invention there would be no online photos, art, memes, or even videos. Thanks to him, the Internet is far more visually interesting than it would’ve been otherwise.
I created a short tribute to him that I uploaded on TikTok, Clapper, and YouTube. If you want to learn more about Stephen Wilhite, I suggest either reading his Wikipedia page or watching this video that announced his death.
Way back in 2012 I did a parody of those motivational posters featuring then-Rep. Todd Akin. At the time he decided to try running for a seat in the U.S. Senate only to have his entire political career permanently derailed when he was asked in a televised interview about the issue of making abortion accessible to women who become pregnant as a result of rape. Rep. Akin, who has been a longtime abortion opponent, initially said “It seems to me, first of all from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare.” Then he gave this quote that totally torpedoed his political career and it became his biggest claim to fame:
“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Of course that quote not only exposed his ignorance of even basic high school-level knowledge of a woman’s reproductive system, it also prompted all kinds of public outcry, including ones from those in his own party. I created this parody motivational poster called Legitimate Rape, which included this definition: “A politician who utters that phrase exposes himself as a Legitimate Ass.”
He initially aired a campaign ad apologizing for that remark but it wasn’t enough to change the outcome of the senate election and he ended up losing. A few years later he wrote a book where he said that he regretted apologizing for that remark because, as he wrote:
“By asking the public at large for forgiveness, I was validating the willful misinterpretation of what I had said”
As Akin continued in his book:
“My comment about a woman’s body shutting the pregnancy down was directed to the impact of stress on fertilization. This is something fertility doctors debate and discuss. Doubt me? Google ‘stress and infertility,’ and you will find a library of research on the subject.”
Todd Akin died a few days ago from cancer. But was it a legitimate cancer? Using the late Todd Akin’s medical logic, if it’s a legitimate cancer, he should have survived because the body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.
I’ll just end this post with this tweet that basically says that Satan gets another Fake Christian to torture for eternity.
I learned about this free website from a TikTok video where you can create your own digital painting of that virtual international pop superstar Hatsune Miku. Here is my first and—so far—only effort.
I found it to be a pretty fun experience. The interface is easy enough so that anyone who has never even touched anything like Photoshop or GIMP can still use it. You can take a stab at creating your own Hatsune Miku art at the website paint.mikuexpo.com.
Portraits of famous figures (such as the Mona Lisa) as recreated by their descendants.
Photographer Miles Herbert tiptoes through the tulips to photograph mice.
Home 3D printed from locally sourced clay takes shape in Italy.
The latest in capsule toys from Japan: Drunk in public miniature figurines.
Hundreds of nuns trained in Kung Fu are biking the Himalayas to oppose human trafficking.
Paris museums put 100,000 images online for unrestricted public use.
Engineer makes a DIY cell phone with a rotary dial so she doesn’t have to use a smartphone.
Elderly people look at their younger reflections in this beautiful photo series by Tom Hussey.
Watch this pianist play through a delightful history of cartoon music.
Original Salvador Dali artwork found at Outer Banks thrift shop.
Dog finds and guards family’s bread whenever they leave the house.
I’m still playing around with TikTok while I’m continuing with crossposting my TikTok videos on my YouTube channel. I decided to my first video art critique of another artist.
I usually don’t go around playing art critic with other people’s art due to the fact that I am an artist myself and I have gone to various art-related social events over the years where I get to meet fellow artists. It would be very awkward for me to make posts severely criticizing someone else’s work only to go to a social event and meet that same artist in person—especially if that artist recognizes my name as the one who trashed-talked his/her art.
But there is this artist named Jon McNaughton who has become a darling of the conservative right-wing Republicans in the U.S. because he creates paintings that have very heavy-handed political rhetoric. I’m not denying the fact that McNaughton is talented. It’s obvious that he has had very extensive art training. He has an aesthetic that’s pretty reminiscent of the late “Painter of Light” Thomas Kinkade. Basically Jon McNaughton is for art lovers who wished that Kinkade had gotten more political.
I first heard of this guy back when Barack Obama occupied the White House and Stephen Colbert had devoted a segment to McNaughton’s art on his old The Colbert Report TV show on Comedy Central. I still remember the audience howling in laughter when McNaughton’s art was shown on TV.
I remember Stephen Colbert had invited his viewers to submit their own version of McNaughton’s art to be aired on a later program. So the next day I downloaded an image of one of McNaughton’s paintings called One Nation Under Socialism, which depicted a grim-faced President Obama burning the U.S. Constitution. (At least one can never accuse McNaughton of being subtle. LOL!) I put the image through Photoshop and came up with my own piece that I simply called Revenge.
I submitted it to The Colbert Report but nothing came of it so I basically moved on.
When Donald Trump was elected president, Jon McNaughton started to create art exalting Trump, which, to me, is just as campy as his paintings that depicted Obama as some kind of a Constitution-burning monster. My personal favorite is Crossing the Swamp, which shows Trump and company arriving to the U.S. Capitol by boat just like the more-famous Washington Crossing the Delaware painting. I live just outside of Washington, DC and I can tell you that not only is the city not THAT swampy, the U.S. Capitol is also NOT located along a body of water. The painting looks like someone had taken the entire building and relocated it into the middle of the Louisiana Bayou.
Last week Jon McNaughton announced on Twitter the release of his latest painting.
That painting is just as outrageously campy as his previous work. It is just so full of WTF moments (such as the idea that Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee would stand near each other in the same room as if there was never a Civil War between them). Even though I normally don’t publicly bash other artists’ art, I decided to make an exception with Jon McNaughton because his work is just so strange that it’s hilarious. He lives and works in Utah while I live in the Washington, DC area so it’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever run into this guy in person at some artist meet-up event.
I’ve been playing around with TikTok so I decided to make a one-minute art critique of McNaughton’s work, which you can view here.
After I was finished with TikTok I decided to crosspost it to YouTube, which is what I’ve done with most of my other TikTok videos. The big challenge is that YouTube has long preferred the horizontal video format (which is the same format that’s used in the movies and TV shows). However, TikTok prefers videos to be shot vertically. For the YouTube version I kept my recorded voice but re-edited the video part where I changed the aspect ratio so it would show horizontally. I also changed the background music to one of YouTube’s royalty-free music since YouTube isn’t quite as okay with people using copyrighted music as TikTok. So here’s the YouTube version of my video.
Jon McNaughton can keep on making paintings exalting Donald Trump if he wants to. But he should know that making such art won’t do anything for his long-term legacy. There’s a reason why Russian artist Alexander Rodchenko is more famous today (his most famous work is the poster he did for the Lengiz Publishing House) than the Russian artists who produced the Socialist Realism art that the government of the old Soviet Union preferred.
Every now and then I go to someone’s Instagram account and I see that someone did an Instagram Mosaic. I’ve wanted to try it out for myself but I haven’t found something that would be appropriate for this kind of treatment until this week. In order to promote my ebook special, I took a photo of my book’s front cover, divided up into nine separate pictures, then uploaded one picture at a time while promoting my book. I finally uploaded the last picture yesterday and here is what my Instagram account currently looks like.
You can see it for yourself in person by clicking right here.
The only downside is that for the next several weeks I’ll have to be careful to upload more pictures on to Instagram in groups of any number that’s divisible by three if I want to keep my mosaic layout intact. Eventually that mosaic will sink low enough on my timeline that I’ll no longer think about it but, for the time being, I want my mosaic to stay intact.
I know that there are apps that will let you divide pictures into mosaics really easily but I chose to use my outdated version of Photoshop to do the division instead because I really don’t see myself doing Instagram Mosaics too often because they really involve a lot of planning. But it’s pretty cool to do once in a while.
And, on that note, I also want to announce that today is the last day that you can download a free copy of my ebook The Cash-Strapped Person’s Guide to Thriving in the Digital Age. This offer ends at midnight tonight and you’ll have to pay $5 if you want my ebook. You can download your free copy right here.
With the deadline for mailing in the Brooklyn Art Library’s Sketchbook Project, I spent the bulk of my free time last week putting the finishing touches on my sketchbook. At the last minute I decided to work on the inside front and back covers as well.
For the inside front cover I basically composed my autobiography (or as much of my life story that I could fit in a 5 inch x 7 inch sketchbook) using the free open source desktop publishing program Scribus. Here is what I wrote:
About the Artist and Photographer
I’ve been told that I started drawing the minute I learned how to hold a pencil in my hand (which probably means that I was around two years old).
I had my first art exhibition when I was in the fourth grade. An elementary school art teacher was so impressed by what I did in her art class that she submitted it to the county-wide art show, which was held at the since-demolished Harundale Mall in Glen Burnie, Maryland. My mother took pictures of me standing next to my art on display (which I still have to this day).
When I was in the Girl Scouts I began to look at what badges I could earn and I was interested in the My Camera badge. My parents bought me my first camera (a Kodak Pocket Instamatic) and I took a few photos (mainly of family get-togethers and vacations). I earned that badge and it foster a lifelong love of photography.
If you want to learn more about me, check out my blog (sagittariusdolly.wordpress.com). You can also send me an email at kimstark61@gmail.com.
Thank you for viewing my sketchbook.
[SIGNATURE HERE]
Kimberly Keyes
The biggest mistake I made was that I had mis-typed my email address and I didn’t catch that mistake until after I had already glued the paper to the inside back cover. I ended up grabbing a pen, crossing out the inaccurate email address, then writing the correct email address. I know that it’s not the most professional way of rectifying a mistake but it does give the sketchbook more of a homespun look so it’s all good.
The inside back cover had a space towards the bottom where I can write such things as social media accounts, email address, and URL of a personal website. But there was this huge amount of space at the top. So I dressed it up by accessing the keyboard symbol of a pointing finger, typing it into TextEdit, blow it up by several points, take a screenshot of it, imported it into Adobe Photoshop, color the sleeve red and the hand blue, printed it out, then glued it into the back cover. Here is what the inside back cover looks like.
By that time I had finished all of the drawings and I was going through my massive collection of photographs to decide which ones I was going to paste into that sketchbook. (I’ll write a separate post at a later date showing a complete list of the drawings and photographs I included in that sketchbook.) It was definitely crunch time for me last week because of the February 1 deadline but I managed to barely finish it in time so I could drop it in the mailbox and ensure that it will arrive in New York City on time.
Sagittarius Dolly 
You must be logged in to post a comment.