influence realization

[egypturnash]

You know what one of the big influences on my mode of art is?

Video games. "Pixel art".

Except not the "pixel art" now practiced by people who spent a lot of time in front of their SNESes or Genesises* or their Macs or even their Amigas. No pretentious 320x200 with enough color flexibility to have a little outline around most things.

Some connection was made when I was on my ass in front of the old Zenith TV with the big clicky VHF and UHF tuner dials and the Atari VCS feeding itself into channel 3. Limited color palettes, in big, solid swathes, with the occasional gradient.

Yeah, I could be like most of the people who hang out around the animation industry and work in similar idioms, and claim I got it mostly from Mary Blair, or from fifties jazz album covers, or something like that, and there is some truth to that**. But I think something in my art is harking back to... the VCS. And the Commodore 64. Where outlines were an impossible luxury.

*Mega Drives to those of you outside the Americas
**Only some. My shading methods match up with that school a lot, but my methods of abstraction and my proportions do not - I don't feel comfortable doing 3-head-high stuff on a routine basis.

Comments

[unciaa.livejournal.com]

What I miss in most online art, and only tend to see as random book covers, is the style I personally call Old SciFi Magazine, the hand-rendered 3d. Used to be that all science fiction books and games in the 80s had covers like these, but now, they're pretty rare. The only recent games that comes to mind is Moonbase Commander.

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

I like the style that so many home and arcade games used in the early 80s. The games themselves didn't have much by way of detail, so the box and manual or arcade cabinet, bezel, and control panel made up for it with graphic design and cool art. I still remember the artwork in the manual from the Atari 2600 version of Berzerk; if only Evil Otto and the Automazeons looked so cool in the game...