Speaking Of Old Art

Yesterday, I was talking about some artwork I did when I was a kid. While I was writing that piece, I did a quick look to see if I still had that t-shirt (I don't) and stumbled across some archive CDs that have some of the earliest computer artwork I did. I thought I'd share some of them here since many are comic-relate.

Here is, I believe, the first instance in which I really started using the computer as a drawing tool...

The file had a creation date of August 5, 1986 and was done in a program called MacPaint. Color was not an option at all, and grey scales were done in a still-pretty-binary fashion. Obviously, scalable fonts weren't a available. The Batman, Shatter and FF figures were based on some existing clip art, and the US 1 truck is largely lifted from some as well, but the other figures were all drawn pixel by pixel.

It would seem that I was able to improve a bit as I got used to the new format. Here's a Far Side cartoon I re-drew a couple months later...

Referring again to yesterday's post about intellectual property, I think it's note-worthy that I was very clear that I had copied Gary Larson's work here.

Jump to a few years later. June 1994. I believe I came across a cool-looking Thor image in Marc Spector: Moon Knight. It was drawn by hand (can't recall the original artist offhand) and I remember thinking it was cool image that would be fairly easy to replicate electronically. I redrew the piece in, I think, Altsys Freehand (This was before Macromedia and/or Adobe had it) during some free time I had during my internship at Kenner toys.

Still some artistic problems (only some of which I can blame on the software) but a definite improvement. Plus, this is still at least five years before computer coloring and/or lettering became common.

Just some interesting pseudo-historical pieces that I thought I'd share.

Related Items craft history