Charis Tsevis

16/04/2026

There is a principle I keep returning to after thirty years of making mosaics: the meaning of a system is not stored in its components. It emerges from their relationships.
I built Skiagrafia with that principle as a literal engineering rule.
Skiagrafia is a macOS application I have been developing for designers, illustrators, and motion artists. It takes folders of photographs and automatically, in batch, converts them into layered vector graphics and clean, transparent assets entirely on your machine. No cloud. No subscriptions. No data leaving your studio.
The pipeline chains together five specialized AI models, each chosen for one specific job: a vision model that reads what is in an image, a detection model that locates each object, a segmentation model that traces its exact boundary, an alpha matting model that softens the edges, and a vectorizer that converts everything into resolution-independent Bézier curves.
The new article on my blog traces the full story: the first sketch on graph paper, the model selection decisions, the architecture that holds it all together, and the design principles learned across five versions of the system.
The mosaic is never finished. It is always being laid.
Read the full article: tsevis.com/every-pixel-is-a-tesserae
GitHub: github.com/tsevis/skiagrafia

23/03/2026

What is American food?
For this editorial project with Artful Living. I built images from hundreds of small elements, ingredients, textures, and memories.
Each mosaic is made from pieces from different cultures, just as the food itself.

Because in the end, food is not just what we eat.
It’s who we are.

Acclaimed food writer Jeff Gordinier explores a new generation of chefs and cookbook authors shaping the narrative of American food today.

11/03/2026

For more than two years now, I’ve been experimenting with building software tools with the assistance of AI systems.
Many people call this “vibe coding”. Personally, I find the term a bit misleading. For me, the interesting question is not the coding itself, but the systems we try to build and the usefulness they bring.
In this short essay, I reflect on something my father taught me when I was young — the beauty of machines — and on how abstraction has always helped humanity advance technology.
Machine code, programming languages, frameworks… and now AI assistants.
A few thoughts about technology, tools, and the quiet role of simplification in progress.
You can read the article here:

Visual designer living on the sunny side of the planet. Photomosaics, computergraphics, neofuturism, digital art and graphic design

10/03/2026

Dear friends, I want to share my MacWhisperer project, a small tool I built for my Mac.
It helps me turn interesting videos and podcasts into clean, readable text that I can reuse in many ways.
I also use it to quickly record ideas and convert them into editable text right away, for myself, friends, or even machine workflows.
It runs on OpenAI’s Whisper model locally on my computer.
Simple, private, and really handy: no spoken content is uploaded to a web server.
Feel free to whisper anything.
Find it on my GitHub or Gitlab

16/02/2026

Hello. Again.
A custom install for

15/01/2026

04/01/2026

R.I.P. Giorgos Papadakis
1951 – 2026
Mosaic portrait commissioned by the ANT1 Group, in recognition of 34 years of dedication to news and journalism.

31/12/2025

Thank you, 2025! Hello, 2026!

29/12/2025

What can you gift to someone who can have everything?
This question stayed with me for months before I touched any tool.
His Majesty the King of Bahrain has access to the finest objects in the world. Another luxury item means nothing.
Another portrait?
But they have hundreds.
The only answer I found: time.

Time is the one currency that cannot be purchased, accumulated, or recovered. The hours spent studying Bahraini heritage, architecture, textiles, geometric traditions, the specific way Gulf light falls on surfaces. The weeks spent training AI models on authentic Islamic patterns, then rejecting most of what they produced.
The days Vira spent curving 450 tile edges by hand, applying gold varnish to each border, calibrating how surfaces would catch light in a royal collection.

This is what makes a gift meaningful to someone who lacks nothing material: the visible evidence of invested human attention.

The process moves from software to hardware to hand. Algorithms analyze. Machines print. Then everything stops—and craft begins. The computational systems did their work: they determined which tile belongs where, at what scale, with what neighbors. But algorithms cannot curve paper. They cannot feel when varnish viscosity is right. They cannot judge when a surface reflects light with warmth rather than coldness.The portraits were unveiled at the Mara'ee Show before the royal family, ministers, and international dignitaries. In that room, surrounded by people who know their own heritage deeply, the months of cultural research either hold up or they don't.
he craft either shows or it doesn't.It held. It showed.

Full project:

Computational mosaic portraits for His Majesty the King and the Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Bahrain. Hundreds of hand-finished tiles per artwork. Computer vision, AI-assisted design, digital mosaic, analog craft, hand made.

17/12/2025

Fear is an alarm bell for the unknown. AI in creative fields is triggering this ancient response right now.
I'm watching three patterns emerge. Some people freeze and decide to wait it out. Others attack, insisting AI will never understand real creativity. But there's a third group that fascinates me. They're transforming their fear into curiosity.
These are the people asking the right question. Not "Will AI replace me?" but "What's my creative compass?" They understand that your compass is your purpose, what drives you to create. The handbook is just today's methods, whether that's Photoshop, Midjourney, or ComfyUI.
Time is our only real capital. Purpose comes first. Trial and error with tools teaches you everything else.
I just wrote about why this psychological pattern matters more than any specific AI debate. These thoughts grew out of a talk I gave recently at Alexander College in Cyprus.
Link: https://tsevis.com/creativity-in-the-era-of-machine-intelligence

17/12/2025

Alexander College had the honour of hosting an inspiring lecture by internationally acclaimed visual artist Charis Tsevis, titled “Creativity in the Age of Machine Intelligence: A Compass and a Handbook.”

The event sparked meaningful dialogue around creativity, visual communication, and the evolving role of AI in design. Students, professionals, and guests had the opportunity to gain valuable insights from one of the most influential voices in contemporary visual art.

A big thank you to Charis Tsevis and everyone who joined us for an evening of inspiration, ideas, and creative exchange.

17/12/2025

There is no place like the academia.
Teach = Learn = Teach = Learn ∞
A big thanks to the students, the staff and the management of Alexander College. All the best for your next steps!