Not everything Sonofka opened was gentle. A portrait of a stern man he painted after a quarrel turned its eyes on the quarrel’s source—a neighbor who had once shouted in the stairwell. The neighbor found himself reflected in the painting and came home, apologetic and puzzled, as though a long-locked part of him had been turned by the portrait’s steady stare. Sonofka closed the painting and the neighbor slept without dreaming.

In the early days of 3D modeling, artists had to flatten out a 3D object (a process called UV unwrapping) and paint on a 2D flat image in software like Adobe Photoshop. This was tedious, as it was incredibly difficult to see how the seams of the texture would line up on the final 3D model. 2. The Rise of Direct Mesh Painting