About Showroom Workshop

For her I can be... a Hero!

How it started

Here it is, my first HiRes picture. It was done using the fantastic albert tool, which is all about getting pixels on the canvas and documenting it. The latter is why I've wanted to give it a try because The Sarge has shared a couple of his timelapse videos and they are just pure bliss to watch. It's not just intervalled screenshots, no, it's recording each action and generats a .png for that resulting in thousands of frames that can then be composited into a video or .gif and the real kicker here is, that you don't have to worry about doing stages.

Anyway, I've downloaded the app and just needed something to draw. I'm not an artist, I don't know how to draw anything — well, except doodeling for fun with nieces and nephews which sometimes does result in stunning stuff — but for starting out, I need a reference that I could adapt into pixels.

I've just completed my Dinosaur Jmin PETSCII and really fell in love with the C64's purple and with that, my mind went to The Maxx, beloved 90's underground purple meatbag with a lampshade on his head and I just knew which panel to pick: him slashing through Isz.

Looking at the pic, it was quite obvious that it's going to be a HiRes picture. Not only would that be way easier to get into as a newbie, but it's a comic panel, so colors are seperated and also quite limited; it's purple and yellow with a dash of red, so that's something I hoped I could manage.

The option to load it up into albert as referece is fantastic; it's like a photoshop layer that you can check back with at any time with a simple STRG+R. It's of course not possible to transfer it 1:1 but at least tracing outlines helped me a lot while getting started. Here's how it looks in albert:

Pixeling away...

It's hard to see in the timelapse, but I've had the need of dithering in my head right from the get-go. There's so much fantastic artworks on the C64 these days and they're topping each other with clever dithering for advanced color mixing as well as gradients and making any form of pixel blocks disappear. Me, I've jumped right into pushing single pixels after I had the first fist roughly filled out and boy, that was unpleasent. Not only wasn't it going anywhere, but it also shifted the whole operations from a fun doodle to a what-was-I-thinking beast.

Good thing, my reaction was to just ignore it, just let future-jmin deal with it and, you know, he's to blame if it doesn't look half decent in the end.

With dithering off my mind, I've just starting to fill in the canvas, here a body part, there a couple of pixels, some color-clashes that were rather easy to fix and while working on it, the idea of keeping the pix dirty came up. What I mean by that? Well, Sam Kieth's paintings and collages range from watercolor to adding cloth, wires and other textures to his canvas, so most of his things have a texture to it, a roughness and my interpretation of that was that I just use a broad outline for seperating the various elements and at the same time the colors. Also, I just through the whole dithering out of the window and went with randomly placed pixels here and there for adding lines and fading from one into the other color. It's definitely not pretty and I guess you wouldn't call it clever but I think it does the job. It's a violent panel, there's a certain danger hanging in the air with Maxx finding himself in the Outback fighing those hands shooting out of the ground trying to rip him apart. This and my harsh pixeling are a great match, I'd say, enhancing each other.

When comparing it to the original, a lot of fine details are lost (well, that's no surprise, right?), but I think I've managed to add a dash of brutal violence back into it, especially with the thick outline around Maxx that seperates not only the colors but himself from the panel, like he's not only slashing through those Isz, but almost also ripping his reality apart, which, if you know the series, is kind of fitting.

Conclusion

I'm happy with the outcome. It's dirty, brutal even; nothing to win a compo with, but it's my first full screen picture without thinking about CharSets. There's no real feedback yet and I'm sure there won't be much anyway because it's rather different from the releases you'd usually see shared on CSDb, and mind, different not as in different style but just miles away in regard of the possibilities that HiRes would allow to incorporate. But I'm really happy with how it turned out. As with my first ever PETSCII, I think I might return to it in a couple of months/years giving it another spin with everything that I will hopefully have learned until then. Should be fun.

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