About BOBicon

A Tribute To The Big Bopper

Bob Hires and I have been friends for decades. We met a long, long time ago at a wild party being held in an empty warehouse in Center City Philadelphia. We had some mutual friends and we were both art students. Bob was attending The Academy of Art to be a painter and I was a student at The Philadelphia College of Art for film/animation.

We had so much in common that our other friends did not including a love of pro wrestling, comic books, monster movies and Dungeons & Dragons.

Over the years, we learned the world of digital graphics together, working on the earliest Mac Classics and Hewlett Packards with single speed CD Rom drives, still storing work on a 1.4MB floppy disk. (I used to pride myself on being able to fit an entire web site onto a 1.4MB floppy disk.) We were the first to draw 16 x 16 pixel icons for software that would be considered archaic at best in today’s world, but was as cutting edge as allowed based on the operating systems and monitors of yore.

BOBicon Goals

To create low effort art by manipulating photos of Bob, items in Bob’s life or special images that represent Bob in some way, using Photoshop filters and color settings the way we experimented in the earliest days of Photoshop Version One. 

12 to 24 distinct images will be created in batches that are produced in under one hour from start to finish and then posted to this web site before being offered on the OpenSea platform. Stay tuned for details.

Photoshop Manipulations

Bob was a pioneer in the use of Adobe Photoshop, having been invited to write chapters for textbooks on the subject. As a result, Bob became an amazing teacher and helped hundreds of people to learn how to use the software. He was a professor of digital arts at Moore College of Art, as well as, the best private tutor anyone could ever have. Bob has forgotten more about Photoshop than I ever knew, so making low effort art with software I have used for thousands of hours to create thousands of pieces of art with is fantastic fun.

Our Community

We hope to continue to bring a little bit of Bob to the world every day and make him a work of art, inspired by his life and the many works of art he created. Bob was a prolific worker with a calendar and plan for everything. Before he died, he had moved to his family home in Long Beach Island, NJ and spent the summer of 2020. My last message to him was on August 26th, 2020 when I invited him to an art event in Smithville, NJ. On August 29th, I was posting to friends and family that Bob was dead. This is part of my way to deal with losing my best friend, Bob.