How I Drew My C64 Pictures
In general the pictures I drew fell into 2 categories, copies of box art / adverts, or original images inspired by the game.
Copied Art
Box art copies were both easier and more difficult. They were easier in that you had reference material to work from and copy, so you didn't have to think of an original idea and scout for reference material. They were harder in that you had to get as close a copy as possible, which wasn't easy on the C64 with it's low resolution, limited colours, and attribute restrictions.
In general I didn't go for an exact copy, as the games had a square or vertical aspect, while the C64 screen had a horizontal aspect. So I tended to adapt the picture to fit the C64 screen, as you can see by the pictures below.
Gribbly's Day Out Box Art
Gribbly's Day Out C64 Loading Screen
Original Art
Original art was very hard to do, as I had to be inspired by the game in order to get good ideas and do a good picture. If the game was rubbish then it was difficult to get going, but if the game was good, then it was easy to get going, and I produced some good work, as with the Warhawk screen, below.
Warhawk C64 Loading Screen.
Drawing a C64 Picture
All my C64 pictures were drawn on a Koala Touch Tablet, using the Koala Painter program.
When I started drawing, the first thing I would do is
choose the background colour of the picture. This was a very important
choice, because this was the one colour you could use anywhere without
fear of it clashing. Normally I used the colour that was most
prevalent in the picture, or if the picture was cartoony with outlines,
then black was an obvious choice. In fact a lot of my pictures use black
as a background colour, as it was also good for stippling and shading.
I'd then start blocking out the various areas of the picture - often
starting with the picture's main focus, such as a character. I'd block it
out using the line drawing feature, building the object out of
interconnected straight lines, because the freehand drawing wasn't
accurate enough.
The outline would then be flood filled with the appropriate colour. I'd
then go in on zoom mode to refine the outline pixel by pixel, and start
adding in detail and shading.
Again, because the tablet wasn't very accurate virtually all the stippling
and shading was done by hand in zoom mode, pixel by pixel. I hardly ever
used Koala Painter's built in stipple shading functions.
Once one section was finished I'd go in and and do the next. Often I'd use
the 'spare' screen to draw an object, then copy it over onto the main
screen. When copying the background colour could be shown as transparent,
so you could copy logos, etc. from the spare screen, over the top of the
art on the main one.
Of course with copying you had to be very careful about colour clashing,
and I often had to go in and manually touch up the edges of a logo or
other object.
I'd save the picture frequently at every stage, but even so, sometimes I
lost artwork when the program crashed while saving!
When a picture was finished I'd 'sign' the picture by adding my signature
to the picture, normally (but not always) in the bottom right. I'd add the
year too, so I could keep track of when I drew the picture.
The final thing I'd do is to stand back and look at my work from a
distance. Often this showed up mistakes in the picture that I then
corrected.
To display the pictures on the C64 without using a paint program I wrote a
small machine code routine to copy the picture onto the screen. I then
used a 'cruncher' file compacter program to shrink the file size down to a
manageable level.
The picture could then be simply loaded and 'run' to put it on screen.