Fuddland
Cat-sitting back at my Mum’s for the weekend, I’ve been left a couple of boxes of my old things to sort through — mostly verifying that it is indeed okay to recycle all those computer magazines from 1984. In amongst everything, I came across a reminder of a pastime I’d forgotten I had: pointless computer art.
The masterpieces were rendered on my trusty Spectrum 48K, and to avoid the dreaded colour clash, everything was done in monochrome. I’d begin by sketching an image onto some graph paper, then wherever the lines passed through a square — corresponding to one pixel on the screen — I’d fill in that square, turning the nicely analogue image into its “digital” equivalent.
Next I’d load up The Artist II and set to work. Taking each 8-by-8 block of pixels in turn, I’d zoom in on that area, and click on those pixels that formed part of the image. The fact that the zoom was a binary-friendly 8-by-8 rather than 10-by-10 meant that I’d had to re-draw all the block boundaries on the graph paper. Eventually, and all in one sitting, I’d reach the final block and had the completed image. And then what did I do? I turned off the computer and went and did something else instead. No saving. Definitely no printing. An utterly pointless, painstaking activity.
Here we have the only remaining artifact of this hobby, the pre-visualisation [ooh get me] of a comic book character called Halo Jones. You can see along the top that this paper was previously used to design a font, and there are also faint marks elsewhere which suggest it was used to draw a different picture before that; I seem to remember being particularly proud of a dragon that I did, so perhaps it was that one.
It seems that my harmless hobby wasn’t all that popular with my siblings, as revealed by the unmistakable scrawl of my sister near the edge of the paper.
Aah, happy days…
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