Life=Risk

Gotta love that.

Evil Hosni

Love this rendition of an evil Hosni Mubarak I found on Gaberism.net, that would make even Hitler feel jealous.

I've never seen an evil Hosni before. Well, in a drawing at least. Tsk tsk tsk tsssk. Even though the coffee stains are a bit too (VERY) out of context, but dang, that is one good evil Hosni drawing.

Kasr El-Malal / Breaking Boredom

Ahmed Foula has rounded up 6 Egyptian artists to collaborate on 12 pieces under the title "Kasr El-Malal / Breaking Boredom," where each piece exhibited will be a collaboration between a random selection of 4 of the 6 following artists:
Engy Aly
George Azmy
Hani Mahfouz
Ibrahim Islam
Mahmoud Hamdy
and myself

The exhibition opens on Sunday, July 6, at Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, and Thursday, August 7, at ACAF in Alexandria.

We're having lots of fun working on the pieces, and we're all very excited about it. Especially me and Mahmoud...

Before Steve Jobs Wore His Black Shirt

From a 1985 issue of Fortune Magazine posted on notcot.org, featuring a young Steve Jobs on the cover along with the headline "THE FALL OF STEVE JOBS." Pretty darn funny in hindsight, I say.

But maybe Steve Jobs only gets his superpower from wearing his black shirt, blue jeans, and white sneakers.


This article, in the same issue, on the rise of "picture phones" is also too funny. This definitely tells you something about the way press works, that you shouldn't always believe what you read. This just proves that press is all about presenting new and exciting content to its readers, new and exciting content will always be about presenting something new, presenting it as the "it" thing, the "in" thing, or it will be about presenting the fall and demise of what was the "it" and the "in" thing.

User-Generated... Virals?

Companies realize the power of user-generated content and take it a notch higher by developing the user-customizable viral.

Urban Artists, Dubai

Apparently, some of my work will be featured at the upcoming Urban Artists event in Dubai organized by Brownbook Magazine. The event is due to take place at Tashkeel on Wednesday, June 18, from 7:00pm to 9:00pm.

I, however, will unfortunately not be there, but if you're in the area, be sure to stop by and take pictures, as I'm sure many many talented revolutionary artists will be showing their work there. Brownbook is pretty vigorous when it comes to its art-hunting.

Check out the Facebook event for more details.

Sketch Frenzy

Last night, I realized I hadn't been drawn or done much quality graphic work in a really long time, andhave been more focused on other projects that explore new mediums (ex: social interaction, film) so it just so happened that I was hit by a surge of inspiration and started going sketch crazy.

The start of a series of drawings exploring the um, the tongue, yeah.

The exploration of the start of a series of pieces examining spirituality and god, using a purely geometric approach to illustration that stems from how early islamists viewed actual depictions of the world to be "haram" (a sin), which led them to explore more abstract geometric depictions which over time developed to become insanely intricate and brilliant pattern works which were then adopted in various ornamentations. I find it especially interesting also, that taking on this geometric approach also seems quite similar to the Italian Avante Garde Futurists of the early 1900's. So I think finding some sort of link between islamic spirituality and futurism could lead to very interesting results. This particular piece I attached explores the popular notion "man 3araf nafso, 3araf rabboh" (he who knows himself, knows his god), often repeated by practicing Muslims even though a great majority of them tend to try and "find" God by looking everywhere else other than themselves.

Not a sketch, you say? Well I only decided to do it designerly/graphically after doing a sloppy job with the original sketch below.

Which was actually referenced from a photograph (WARNING: NUDITY - duh) posted at drawingboard.org

Forever Geek

I absolutely love this wicked awesome Nintendo Entertainment System Coffee Table-sized Controller, that not only functions as a coffee-table, and storage box, but as a gigantic NES CONTROLLER!!! Built by awesome Kyle, which you can read more about on his ultra awesome blog.


So kickass. Makes me want to pull out my old NES and get it to work again.

And I think these vintage film posters designed by The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas for its cult-friendly retrospective programming of films is where awesome was born:



I also remember when I was barely five years old, admiring the kids in the hood kicking asphalt on their skateboards (okay, so maybe it was more of a suburban compound overlooking the ocean than it was a "hood"), I remember one of the things I found so captivatingly cool about them skateboards was the graphics on the decks. So I'm really thrilled to have found a little collection of 80's skate graphics online: