h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's interesting how much it *looks* like a picture from that era. (Of computing, rather than mythology, I mean. ) I guess it must be an upshot of the restraints in place, but it really takes me back to the kind of pictures I was used to seeing back then. I'd forgotten how much I'd got used to the more subtle continuous tones we have with 'true colour' systems these days.

(And of course there's the absence of the set of artifacts unique to today's compression technologies, which will, I suspect, come back to haunt us just like the way state of the art early 80s studio video tape looks really crummy these days!)

Except for Luxo, of course!

I'm going to have to get out my SigGraph 1992 tape out and see what I think.

These days I have Painter 6 and Photoshop with a gazillion plug-ins, and Knockout for clipping (used to take me HOURS AND HOURS to clip images for digital collage, and then even more hours to hand-apply the anti-aliasing), but I miss the Zen-like theta-wave state I could get from painting with light the old way.

I forgot to put the link to my gallery here. If you'd like to look at more of what I'm doing, do visit http://www.h2g2.com/A304354 and my "Mug Shots" for the Aroma Cafe at, uh, hm. OK, my most bravura online effort is the cafe float, fullsize at http://www.h2g2.com/A283510 ...

Thanks for your comments.

Nice piece Lil. I remember trying to work in some of the early paint programs on computers and being so frustrated with developing a good 'pixel' style.

It would be interesting if someone sponsored a 'retro digital art' contest -- ie, specifying that works had to be x pixels wide and y pixels high and only use 256 colors, and judge based on the most creative use of the limitations.

Sort of like a recent contest for the most interesting web page with total size of 5K or less (including any graphics, all code, etc.)

Ah, but the interesting thing is how things have come full circle: most web spot graphics would fill the bill! I would have to look around for a toll that would limit my palette while leaving me the tools I'm accustomed to. TeMPRA did recognise my old Summasketch tablet, so I have always been able to paint "naturally".

UUsing the web-safe palette is insanely restrictive, actually -- at least in the old days you could decide WHICH 256 colours it was going to be -- but anyone with screen-print experience would have the edge on someone with a style like mine.

I remember (and used for some time) computers which had a 24 (or was it 16) bit pallete, but could only display 256 colours at any one time* Using netscape was hard, especially if it was installed with a private colormap - all that colour flashing

*These were sun workstations from the mid 90's or so, doing electronic cad (visualy intensive if you're laying out a silicon chip!)