GoKawiilLittle Egypt Close-up detail
Back in the day, I discovered that creating digital art on the brand-new 128K Macintosh computer was exactly like drawing on an Etch-A-Sketch. In other words, I could do it and few others could.
You drew with a mouse, you had black, you had white, you had a few tools. Bill Atkinson had given us MacPaint, and I used that. I didn’t know the difference between the software and the desktop. There were rudimentary scanners but I never used them. I thought the whole world knew how to draw directly onscreen using a mouse and MacPaint, so that’s what I did. Actually there were about four of us.
Because of this rare ability, I created several volumes of popular clip art, the first underground comic on the Mac, and got to speak at a lot of trade shows. This early black-and-white digital artwork was painstakingly created a pixel at a time, and must be used at 100 % or turn to mush.
The whole world was converting to computers. I was hired by studios to teach legendary artists how to create art on a computer. Get good and tired, I said, because your adult mind will forget that it can’t do what you’re asking it to do. By the end of the decade I was working all over the industry, including Disney, Paramount, BBDO (Apple’s ad agency at the time) and building digital game art for the likes of Super Mario Brothers and Barbie.
Little Egypt
Brazen Images
Brazen Images was a series begun on the first color Mac, in 1989-1990. The pieces were mouse-built using Studio 8, in 256 colors. It incorporated earlier work built in 8 colors in the color MacPaint. Two of the images, Little Egypt and A Chorus Line, were created in 8 colors only. It took so long to create each figure in each painting that I used them over and over in different combinations, like a vocabulary. It took me two months to build Dancing Fool, in Studio 8. Later I was able to work faster, and then in 1990 came Adobe Photoshop, with millions of colors, and the Wacom Tablet, a life-changer. I converted these early files to millions, with results like Earth Angel Flyer, but I kept these originals, and am I glad I did. They read like mosaics, and they took as long to build.
Earth Angel
Club Mutant close-up
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