Category: Blog

In my last post, I spoke about my earliest influences in computer art. That medium has fascinated me since I was a kid in the ’70s. However, I was drawing and painting before I saw my first video game. Granted, I was just in kindergarten and my art skills were not great. But ever since I first picked up a crayon, I have been drawing.

One day, when I was a toddler, I discovered a magic marker. My mother subsequently found me drawing on the wall in the hall outside the kitchen! She scolded me, of course. But I just looked up at her and giggled. She thought the sight was so cute that she got my father to take a picture of me in the act. If I can find that photo I’ll post it here in the future.

I Was the Kid Who Could Draw

Art class was always my favorite. In grade school, it was once a week. Outside of that class, I was drawing whenever I had the chance. Naturally, I became known as the kid who could “draw” in my class.

Since I was a little boy who loved sci-fi, it wasn’t suprising that I mostly drew pictures of spaceships and the like. I wasn’t very good at drawing people. I resorted to tracing pictures from photos and advertisements. As any good artist knows, that’s not how you learn to draw. But my elementary school art teacher was able to show me some of the basic techniques of sketching from real life. My first sketch was probably of my shoe, if I recall correctly. But sketching didn’t come easy.

I think something that obstructed my ability to sketch people was my love for the seemingly simple styles of comic books and comic strips. I would copy what I saw in comics without a clear understanding of the choices the artists made. I made the same mistake I see so many young artists are doing now with their imitations of popular anime and manga: imitation without learning foundational skills.

I will never forget the day I finally grasped how to sketch people. I was about 11 years old in the 6th grade. We an hour outside where we all isolated ourselves on the playground where we were supposed to read or draw or just enjoy the nice day. The point was to sit still and not talk to others. So I started sketching my friend Robert who was sitting about ten yards away. Because it was a nice day and I had no distractions, I concentrated on my drawing like I had never done before. The results was impressive. If I still have this drawing, I’ll post a scan of it someday.

Van Gogh

In junior high school (what’s now called “middle school”), I got my first taste of formal art training. I had a good teacher who had me sketch and learn fundamentals of like work, shading, and so on. I bought my first sketch book and drawing pencils. And I definitely got more comfortable with drawing people.

As a final assignment for the school year, our art teacher instructed us to choose a favorite artist and then paint a still life in that artist’s style. I chose Van Gogh. And I really liked the results!

I really appreciate how Van Gogh broke down light and colors into their component colors. To me, this idea really appealed to me because before I knew very much about Post-Impressionism, I had already learned that several points of colors could combine together into new colors. I got that wisdom from examining the crude video game graphics in the arcade and on my computer. I knew that the color on a cathode ray tube television was made by combining varying degrees of red, green, and blue. I saw that in the work of George Seurat. But Van Gogh’s color combinations are gorgeous.

As I said in my first post, where do I begin? Perhaps it’s best to properly introduce myself and describe some of my backstory. I am in my 50s and so my story could be quite long. So I’ll just focus on my first experiences with computer art.

I was born in 1970 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the United States. My home town is sometimes called “The Atomic City” because it was part of the Manhattan Project during the World War II. Today it is home of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and is a world-renowned center of research. I suppose some of that science stuff rubbed off onto me despite my life-long interest in art. Because from my earliest days of my childhood I have always been fascinated with computer art.

Pong

I was a small child when video games first became popular. I wasn’t just interested in playing the games. I was fascinated by how I was able to affect what was happening on the screen. You must understand that I grew up in a time when there was no cable TV, let alone streaming services. Back then, you turned on the TV and you couldn’t do anything to change what was happening on the screen. But with video games, it was interactive.

The first video game I ever played was Pong. I was probably six years old. If you are familiar with the game, it is not impressive by today’s standards. But back in the mid-1970s, it was a smash hit. It wasn’t long before I was spending my allowance at arcades. Meanwhile the video games became more colorful. Even though I was just a kid, I noticed how they used limited palettes of color and clever arrangements of pixels to portray all sorts of characters and scenery.

Video Graffiti

Right around 1980, our family got an Atari game console. Although most of the games for it were not as intricate and colorful as the ones at the arcades, there was one game in particular that absolutely captivated me. It was Surround and it was Atari’s version of the arcade game, Blockade. The object of Surround was to control your player–which was just a huge pixel–around the screen while it left a trail behind. Meanwhile your opponent is doing the same thing. You win by forcing the other player to crash into one of the trails.

Surround was elegantly simple and yet challenging. But the game also included a variation called “Video Graffiti”. In modern terms, I suppose one could call it a “creative mode” of the game. Instead of playing the game proper, you could move your player-pixel around the screen at will. You could create or erase the trails you made. Thus you were able to draw simple pictures!

The resolution of the images I drew was pitifully tiny. And I could only work with two colors that I couldn’t change. But I was gobsmacked with the idea that I could actually paint pictures on a video screen!

I even took it a step further and made simple animations with it using a video tape recorder. I would draw an image, record it for a second on the VCR, alter the image a little bit, record another second, and so on. The animations I made were very bad. But it worked well enough to impress my cat, I suppose.

My First Drawing Tablet

In the early 1980s, home computers had become popular. There were popular brands such as Apple and Commodore. But the one I wanted was the Atari 800. It was capable of displaying as many colors as the arcade games. Best of all, I was able to write programs that could draw pictures.

The first programming language I learned was Atari BASIC. It didn’t take long for me to figure out how to make it draw images. Like all little kids, I was familiar with the “connect-the-dots” picture puzzles found in coloring books. The principle was the same but BASIC used a two-dimensional coordinate system. Before long, I was maxing out the memory with the programs I wrote. The Atari 800 only had 48 kilobytes to spare. Which is microscopic compared to the software I use today.

My parents noticed my interest in computer graphics. One day they surprised me with a present. It was the Atari Touch Tablet CX77 along with the Atari Artist program cartridge. I was overjoyed! I had no idea such a thing as a drawing tablet existed. The technology had existed for many years. I think I was aware of it but I didn’t know one existed for the Atari.

I had a ball with the thing. I made tons of pictures with it that are now long-gone, lost on worn-out disks that were eventually thrown away. It doesn’t matter since the pictures weren’t that great. What was important was that I learned the value of the use of the tablet. In fact, it’s worth noting that I started using a drawing tablet before I ever touched a mouse. This is something that only just occurred to me right now as I write this.

By the end of the 1980s, unfortunately, I realized that the Atari Computer had become outdated. Other computers, such as the Amiga, had higher resolution and even more colors. It was several years before I was able to get a better computer when I finally went to art school. But that’s another story.