I am one of those guys that was completely shocked when Adobe bought Macromedia and that shed quite alot of tears when Adobe announced soon after that the first product that was going to be put to sleep would be Freehand. (Bloody Murder! Though I guess everyone saw that coming.)
I love Freehand, I have been using it for years, I am just very used to straight-to-the-point approach and the no-fancy-bullshit way it supports, so I can’t really let go of it.
However, because nothing will happen with this program in the future I have tried to get myself familiar with Illustrator a few times, but for some reason I always gave up pretty fast, being frustrated because the whole concept of both programs are so very different.
But I recently found a tutorial that claims to teach you Illustrator in 30 days, and this will be my new years resolution. Let’s see how that works out.
Just some notes about Pixeling in Photoshop. I started doing graphics on the C64, so I am used to pixeling and still use it whenever I have to (or want to).
A few hints to make it abit easier :
1. You dont have to zoom in and out of your picture while working on it. Instead, you can use the “new window for” command to open a second view for a picture. Scale one to 1600% and one to 200% and you can pixel easily while seeing what it looks like on the second view.
2. You can define a pixel grid, see the screenshot. The grid will be visible only in the 1600%-view if you enable it there.
3. Use the “X” Shortcut, which switches background and foreground colour. Make foreground black, background white and pixel away. You can do atleast the outlines and be able to “delete” wrong pixels.
4. Obviously, the tool to use is the pencil with a size of 1 and “precise cursor” switched on.
Mehdi has two very powerful and free plugins that solve two specific problems that often appear when doing graphics.
The first one is called “Eraser Classic”. It basically turns a selectable colour into a transparent area, something that layouters/graphic designers need very often. Atleast I get alot of my sourcefiles with white or black background. Now you could use the magic wand or “select colour” to make it “go away”, but “Eraser Classic” does a much better job, first because it can select the neighbouring colours based on a “sphere” selection (rather than “cube” like the magic wand does) and secondly because it does smooth transparency.
The second one is called “Fine Threshold” which is a much better working substitute for the original “Threshold”-Function of Photoshop because it does antialiased edges. If you often scan handdrawn sketches to work with you will definately love this.
Get the plugins and try them out, both saved me alot of time in the past.
Some time ago I made a dedicated page about the art of C64-Disc-Covers and scanned my (rather small) collection.
Back in the 80s and 90s all C64-Scene-Releases like new Demos, Discmags and Musicdiscs where mostly spread per Mail. There were a few BBSes around, but for most of the C64 sceners that whole thing was way too hot since you had to get into Blueboxing, Phreaking and Calling Card Hacking and the possible sentence if caught and sent to a court was not very amusing for most people and so BBS-Systems where mostly run and called by people who were more on the illegal side anyway (Crackers).
Every legal scener had some contacts that he swapped discs per mail with, in my best times I had about 40 people from all over europe that sent me packages with discs and I send them my packages with discs. Also those dics where 5 1/4″ floppy discs, in case you don’t remember (or never knew).
Now I have no idea who came up with the idea of disccovers, but it was like this : Some artist drew the outlines of a floppydisc paperbag on a A4-sheet of paper, made some art (mostly about a specific group, demo or discmag) and then just ran that paper over a xerox machine and send it to all his contacts, together with the disc that cover was made for. His contacts now got one copy, ran this copy over a xerox themselves and sent that copy to their other contacts and so forth.
Because everything mainly reduces to black and white if being copied a few times a unique style was born.
The page can be found here: http://www.loozabeats.de/c64covers/
