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“I know my pieces are influencing AI models and millions of digital paintings. While I’m not sure where this trend will lead, I do know that original art created by humans will always be the basis of any technology in the future.”
– Erin Hanson, painter
 
Erin Hanson’s artistic journey is as vivid as the landscapes she paints. Drawing from the dramatic hues of Red Rock Canyon in Nevada and the Pacific coast, Hanson uses bold colors and textured brushstrokes in her signature style of “Open Impressionism.”
 
Through Samsung’s long-standing partnership with Saatchi Art, customers can access her unique works and access her colorful world on Samsung Art Store. Samsung Newsroom sat down with Hanson to discuss the scenery that inspires her and hear how technology is blurring boundaries in the art world by merging the physical with the digital.
 
▲ Erin Hanson
 
 
Letting Creativity Bloom
Q: Tell us a bit about your artistic journey. When did you begin painting?
 
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be an artist. I started with oil paintings when I was 8 years old and explored other mediums — but I was always drawn back to oils since that’s what the masters painted in. When I hold a brush full of buttery paint and breathe in the smell of oils, I feel directly connected to the great painters of the past.
 
 
Q: Please tell us more about Open Impressionism.
 
People kept telling me that my paintings were distinctive and instantly recognizable, so I formed the term Open Impressionism after I had crafted about 400 paintings in this unique style. My focus is on color, light and the feeling of being surrounded by beauty in the outdoors. I call my style “open” because my inspiration comes from open-air landscapes. I use the impasto technique and keep my impressionistic paintings highly textured without smearing or blending colors. Through decisive brushstrokes, I let the underpainting peek out to give my works the appearance of stained glass or a mosaic.
 
▲ Dawning Saguaro (2021)
 
 
Q: Your paintings often feature stunning natural landscapes. What are your favorite locations? How have they influenced your creative process?

My first muses were the rocky landscapes of Nevada and southern Utah — the saturated colors of the scenic desert gave me endless subject matter whenever I went rock climbing at Red Rock Canyon. I’ve now explored many national parks and monuments including Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon and Canyon de Chelly.
 
When I moved back to California, I started exploring Carmel and Mendocino on the Pacific coast. I fell in love with painting the vineyards, oak trees and rolling hills of California’s wine country. Yosemite and Lake Tahoe always draw me in with their dramatic colors and seasons.
 
“When I hold a brush full of buttery paint and breathe in the smell of oils, I feel directly connected to the great painters of the past.”
 
 
Framing Nature’s Beauty
Q: Your painting “Coastal Poppies II” is a favorite among users of The Frame. How did you translate this captivating piece for a digital platform?
 
“Coastal Poppies II” is inspired by one of my favorite coastal views in California, near Heart Castle and Big Sur. The painting brings me back to a time when the poppies were in full bloom, and I was standing alongside Highway 1 on the edge of the Pacific Coast — looking down into the rich aquamarine water with the salty ocean air blowing into my face. The contrast in colors and textures was so breathtaking that I completed four paintings in this series. The most recent was “Coastal Poppies IV” in 2022.
 
▲ Coastal Poppies II (2020)
 
“I formed the term Open Impressionism after I had crafted about 400 paintings in this unique style. My focus is on color, light and the feeling of being surrounded by beauty in the outdoors. I’ve [now] painted more than 3,000 oil pieces in [this] style”
 
 
Q: Can you share how you feel about your work being displayed on The Frame?
 
I like The Frame because the art is displayed on a wall, right where a real painting would hang. My fans and collectors can experience the brushstrokes and rhythms of texture within the painting which can be difficult to see on smaller displays.
 
I am also amazed at how well the Frame recreates the vibrant colors of my artwork. My impressionist paintings are all about color, and I love how the Frame captures the colors so accurately!
 
*Editor’s note: In 2024, The Frame became the first in the industry to earn the Pantone® Validated ArtfulColor certification. The Matte Display also minimizes light reflection to help viewers admire art under overhead room lights or even daylight.
 
 
Q: Out of all your pieces that users can display on The Frame, which are your top three picks?
 
My favorites are “Coastal Poppies II,” “Apple Blossoms” and “Cherry Blossoms.”
 
▲ Apple Blossoms (2023)
 
“Apple Blossoms” was inspired by a 30-year-old apple tree on my property. Since I moved up to the Willamette Valley in the Oregon wine country, I’ve been attracted to the four seasons in the Northwest.
 
▲ Cherry Blossom (2023)
 
“Cherry Blossom” captures a grove of blooming cherry trees near my gallery in McMinnville, Oregon. With pink cherry blossoms against a perfect blue sky, the painting is truly a harbinger of spring.
 
 
Q: “Apple Blossoms” will be part of Samsung Art Store’s April curated collection, “Spring in Bloom.” What can users expect?
 
The “Spring in Bloom” collection will capture everything there is to love about springtime. I live in Oregon, where spring arrives after a long, cold and wet winter. It feels like that moment in “The Wizard of Oz” when the world turns to technicolor — almost like someone flipped a switch one night, and the world is suddenly full of daffodils, mustard fields and flowering plum and cherry trees. I hope users get to experience that same kind of wonder and magic when they see this collection.
 
“My dream is to create an immersive Erin Hanson experience where people can step right into my paintings [in a digital environment] and be surrounded by moving pictures of my artwork”
 
 
Embracing Immersive Art Through Technology
Q: Can you share more about what drew you to work with Saatchi Art, a longtime partner of the Art Store?
 
Beyond showing its works on The Frame, Saatchi Art is the best online hub for showcasing original artwork. The art collection is well-curated, with, and there is an amazing variety of styles and mediums. The fact that there is something for everyone makes it a great way for collectors to find new artwork, again and again. I have been selling my work through Saatchi Art for over a decade now. The Saatchi team is always helpful and easy to work with.
 
 
Q: Traditional art galleries allow viewers to experience paintings in person and fully appreciate the texture, brushstrokes and scale. How do you think digital formats impact the way people engage with art?
 
I’ve painted more than 3,000 oil pieces in my Open Impressionism style — and truthfully, I struggled to find ways to share my work with fans and collectors. Although I have several coffee table books and many paper prints, the best way to share my collections is through digital formats.
 
For digital formats, we typically look for compositions that work well on a long, horizontal layout. To obtain such high-resolution images of my paintings, we use a large scanner in my gallery that takes up the entire room. The scanner photographs the paintings from above using five different light angles, so we can control the amount of shadow that is visible in the final images. This variation gives the illusion of three dimensions, so you can almost reach out and feel the brushstrokes.
 
In addition, we map my oil paintings to produce high-resolution, three-dimensional textured prints. They’re so lifelike that most people can’t tell the difference between the replica and the original.
 
My dream is to create an immersive Erin Hanson experience where people can step right into my paintings and be surrounded by moving pictures of my artwork. In a digital environment like this, visitors can appreciate a larger quantity of art than the dozen or so pieces they might see hanging in a gallery or festival setting.
 
 
Q: Do you see technology playing an increasingly significant role in the art world? If so, how do you anticipate this trend to unfold in the years to come?
 
I am sure technical innovators will continue to find new ways to create and share artwork. For example, bigger The Frame TVs would allow art lovers to display even larger works of art on their walls. I know my pieces are influencing AI models and millions of digital paintings. While I’m not sure where this trend will lead, I do know that original art created by humans will always be the basis of any technology in the future. A computer may be able to alter and combine different paintings to create a new piece, but the original images were all created by individual artists who viewed the world in their own distinct ways.
 
 
Q: Can you tell us about any upcoming projects?
 
This year, I am traveling to France to follow in the footsteps of the impressionists and visit all the famously painted locations in Paris, following the Seine to Arles and Le Havre in southern France. I will be visiting the windowsill where Van Gogh sat and painted “Starry Night” and exploring the gardens that Monet so famously painted. This has been a dream of mine for several years, and it is finally coming true. Afterward, I plan to create a collection of French-inspired works in homage to the 150th anniversary of the first impressionist exhibition.
 
The works from this collection, “Reflections of the Seine,” will be released in September. You can read more here: erinhanson.com/Event/ReflectionsoftheSeine.
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The web doesn’t have a marketing team. It doesn’t have a single developer program you can sign up to. And it doesn’t have a manual. That’s by design. Like the Internet, the web isn’t controlled by any single entity. But this decentralisation can also be a pain for web developers and designers.
The web has lots of documentation, but it’s often an issue for developers to find documentation that is not written from a perspective of one web product — for example, a browser or a framework. The web needs a place where people can go to get the ground truth.
Over the last decade, MDN has become that trusted source of information — a place where developers know they can get the documentation they need about how to build for the web. That’s because, even though it’s a project run by Mozilla, it documents the web across all browsers. Cross-browser compatibility is one of the key pain points of web development, and good documentation is one of the ways we can mitigate that pain. Ask any developer where they go first for documentation and they will likely cite MDN.
That’s why, in 2017, I jumped at the chance of joining the Product Advisory Board of MDN. I saw it as an opportunity to give back, and also to be a part of a project to reinforce this cross-browser message. By the way, I started my career as a technical writer, so I have opinions on the importance of good technical writing when it comes to the developer experience. The product advisory board was an experiment from MDN to bring in an external advisory group — including members from Microsoft, Google and W3C. These organisations were all already investing time in building and maintaining MDN. The PAB gave them a way to advise on product direction and hear about future planning.

Open Web Docs

Fast forward to 2020. Mozilla restructured and MDN took a hit. As a response, the same organisations (and people) who had come together to support MDN via the Product Advisory Board came together again, with others, to launch something called Open Web Docs. Open Web Docs is a new open source project, set up to help support and maintain documentation on the web — via MDN. In practice, this means that Open Web Docs will be paying writers to help write documentation and build the tools that are required to produce high-quality web documentation (for example, to maintain browser compatibility data), in collaboration with Mozilla. Open Web Docs will help to ensure the stability of MDN and will focus the activities of the multiple stakeholders in good web documentation. I’m proud to have been a part of the planning for this effort. I’m also glad that Samsung Internet will be investing our time and energy, both through our continued participation in the MDN Product Advisory Board and via Open Web Docs, in helping to document the web platform.
A beautiful library at Trinity College, Dublin. Photo by Alex Block on Unsplash
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Looking to show off your design chops? You can now submit your portfolio to Samsung and apply to become a Galaxy Watch face or Galaxy Themes seller. The submission window is open October 14 - October 27.
Galaxy Watch
Check out our latest how-to blog and read up on the new process for watch face design reviews. Then head over to the submission page and complete your application.
Galaxy Themes
Watch our video for an overview of the process and what you need to prepare. Then download the Themes Submission Starter Kit and let the creative juices flow. Once you've assembled everything, complete your application here.
While you're working on your portolfio, listen to Tony show Diego how to use Galaxy Themes Studio. It will livestream on Thursday, October 15 at 10am PT and will be available on YouTube for replay.
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The application process is very selective, and only the best of the best are selected. Think you have what it takes? We can't wait to find out.
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Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) is an advanced lossy texture compression format, developed by Arm and AMD and released as royalty-free open standard by the Khronos Group. It supports a wide range of 2D and 3D color formats with a flexible choice of bitrates, enabling content creators to compress almost any texture asset, using a level of compression appropriate to their quality and performance requirements.
ASTC is increasingly becoming the texture compression format of choice for mobile 3D applications using the OpenGL ES and Vulkan APIs. ASTC’s high compression ratios are a perfect match for the mobile market that values smaller download sizes and optimized memory usage to improve energy efficiency and battery life.

ASTC 2D Color Formats and Bitrates
astcenc 2.0
The ‘astcenc’ ASTC compression tool was first developed by Arm while ASTC was progressing through the Khronos standardization process seven years ago. astcenc has become widely used as the de facto reference encoder for ASTC, as it leverages all format features, including the full set of available block sizes and color profiles, to deliver high-quality encoded textures that are possible when effectively using ASTC’s flexible capabilities.
Today, Arm is delighted to announce astcenc 2.0! This is a major update which provides multiple significant improvements for middleware and content creators.
Apache 2.0 Open Source License
The original astcenc software was released under an Arm End User License Agreement. To make it easier for developers to use, adapt, and contribute to astcenc development, including integration of the compressor into application runtimes, Arm relicensed the astcenc 1.X source code on GitHub in January 2020 under the standard Apache 2.0 open source license.
The new astcenc 2.0 source code is now also available on GitHub under Apache 2.0.
Compression Performance
astcenc 1.X emphasized high image quality over fast compression speed. Some developers have told Arm they would love to use astcenc for its superior image quality, but compression was too slow to use in their tooling pipelines. The importance of this was reflected in the recent ASTC developer survey organized by Khronos where developer responses rated compression speed above image quality in the list of factors that determine texture format choices.
For version 2.0, Arm reviewed the heuristics and quality refinement passes used by the astcenc compressor—optimizing those that were adding value and removing those that simply didn’t justify their added runtime cost. In addition, hand-coded vectorized code was added to the most compute intensive sections of the codec, supporting SSE4.2 and AVX2 SIMD instruction sets.
Overall, these optimizations have resulted in up to 3x faster compression times when using AVX2, while typically losing less than 0.1 dB PSNR in image quality. A very worthwhile tradeoff for most developers.

astcenc 2.0 - Significantly Faster ASTC Encoding
Command Line Improvements
The tool now supports a clearer set of compression modes that directly map to ASTC format profiles exposed by the Khronos API support and API extensions.
Textures compressed using the LDR compression modes (linear or sRGB) will be compatible with all hardware implementing OpenGL ES 3.2, the OpenGL ES KHR_texture_compression_astc_ldr extension, or the Vulkan ASTC optional feature.
Textures compressed using the HDR compression mode will require hardware implementing an appropriate API extension, such as KHR_texture_compression_astc_hdr.
In addition, astcenc 2.0 now supports commonly requested input and output file formats:
Loading LDR images in BMP, JPEG, PNG, and TGA formats Loading HDR images in OpenEXR and Radiance HDR formats Loading compressed textures in the “.astc” file format provided by astcenc, and the DDS and KTX container formats Storing LDR images into BMP, PNG, and TGA formats Storing HDR images into OpenEXR and Radiance HDR formats Storing compressed texturesinto the “.astc” file format provided by astcenc, and the DDS or KTX container formats Core Codec Library
Finally, the core codec is now separable from the command line front-end logic, enabling the astcenc compressor to be integrated directly into applications as a library.
The core codec library interface API provides a programmatic mechanism to manage codec configuration, texture compression, and texture decompression. This API enables use of the core codec library to process data stored in memory buffers, leaving file management to the application. It supports parallel processing for compression of a single image with multiple threads or compressing multiple images in parallel.
Using astcenc 2.0
You can download astcenc 2.0 on GitHub today, with full source code and pre-built binaries available for Windows, macOS, and Linux hosts.
For more information about using the tool, please refer to the project documentation:
Getting started: learn about the high-level operation of the compressor. Format overview: learn about the ASTC data format and how the underlying encoding works. Efficient encoding: learn about using the command line to effectively compress textures, and the encoding and sampling needed to get functional equivalents to other texture formats that exist on the market today. Arm have also published an ASTC guide, which gives an overview of the format and some of the available tools, including astcenc .
Arm ASTC Guide: an overview of ASTC and available ASTC tools. If you have any questions, feedback, or pull requests, please get in touch via the GitHub issue tracker or the Arm Mali developer community forums:
https://github.com/ARM-software/astc-encoder https://community.arm.com/graphics/ Khronos® and Vulkan® are registered trademarks, and ANARI™, WebGL™, glTF™, NNEF™, OpenVX™, SPIR™, SPIR-V™, SYCL™, OpenVG™ and 3D Commerce™ are trademarks of The Khronos Group Inc. OpenXR™ is a trademark owned by The Khronos Group Inc. and is registered as a trademark in China, the European Union, Japan and the United Kingdom. OpenCL™ is a trademark of Apple Inc. and OpenGL® is a registered trademark and the OpenGL ES™ and OpenGL SC™ logos are trademarks of Hewlett Packard Enterprise used under license by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.
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Looking to show off your design chops? You can now submit your portfolio to Samsung and apply to become a Galaxy Watch face or Galaxy Themes seller. The submission window is open August 12 - August 25.
Galaxy Watch
Check out our latest how-to blog and read up on the new process for watch face design reviews. Then head over to the submission page and complete your application.
Galaxy Themes
Watch the video below for an overview of the process and what you need to prepare. Then download the Themes Submission Starter Kit and let the creative juices flow. Once you've assembled everything, complete your application here.
The application process is very selective, and only the best of the best are selected. Think you have what it takes? We can't wait to find out.
Like the designs featured in the banner? You can check out Joe and Dog and many other designs on the Infinity Watchfaces website.
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