Blog / 2018 / Another Seemel Photo Filter

In 2009, I painted a self-portrait.

Working from a reference photo taken by my sweetheart, I created this painting using brushes, paint, my hands, and my heart.

In 2017, Picas developed a filter and named it “the Seemel” after my style.

They used my 2009 self-portrait as a thumbnail of what the Seemel filter could do, though, from my use of it on the source photo for my 2009 piece—seen in the middle—it’s clear that their Seemel filter doesn’t Seemel it up that much. You can watch the process of using Picas on the original source photo in this video, and you can even use the Picas Seemel filter on your own photo.

In 2018, Ostagram developed a kind of photo filter using my 2009 self-portrait without crediting me.

Rahid put the Ostagram filter on a picture of his own, and then did a Google image search to find me so he could share the joy of what he’d done. You can see more Ostagram uses of my work here. (I do not endorse Ostagram and will not use it myself because their terms of use are presented in a language I do not speak.)

I could react to this in one of two ways:

1. The computers are going to take all our jobs!
2. The computers are capable of nothing without my originality.

I’m going with number 2, though I admit that number 1 does cross my mind—especially when Ostagram doesn’t even credit the artists whose work they use! But that’s not the computer’s fault: that’s people being mean and/or careless. And when we finally fix that problem, I imagine that a lot of other things will be solved too, and I still won’t be worried about number 1.

In the meantime, you should know that you can commission me to Seemel you up in a totally original manner!