tomoya@mato ~/site/after-hours/illustrations $ ls -l

Illustrations

Pictures made for this site rather than found for it. There is no photograph of me anywhere here and there is not going to be one; this is what stands in that place instead.

  • A flat-colour illustration of a surfer in a blue wetsuit top walking up the sand with a white longboard under one arm, the sea in bands behind and a low orange sun.
    Board under arm
    Flat colourSurf

    Walking back up the sand with the board under one arm and the leash trailing, sun already low. Four colours and a horizon — the same coast the two reconstructions under animations/ are about, on a day when nothing went wrong.

    Made with an image model (OpenAI’s gpt-image) to a written brief, then picked out of several takes and stripped of its metadata. The figure is not a portrait — see below.

tomoya@mato ~/site/after-hours/illustrations $ cat NO-FACES

The face is turned away and left unresolved on purpose. What the plate carries is a posture, a board and a coastline — nothing anyone could pick a person out of a crowd by. That is the whole reason this version is the one published. A likeness drawn from a photograph is still a likeness: an earlier take had a full face, recognisable in a second to anyone who has met me, and it is not on this site for exactly that reason. Illustration is not anonymity by itself — the choice of what to draw is. The file is served from here and fetches nothing. It carries no EXIF, no GPS and no C2PA manifest: the generator's provenance chunk held a pair of identifiers and 21 KB of signing certificate, and none of that is the page's business, so the image was re-encoded from pixels alone. The model's invisible watermark lives in those pixels and is still there. Removing it was never the point — saying where the picture came from is, and that is what the note under the plate is for.

tomoya@mato ~/site/after-hours/illustrations $