Today I made a move from ASCII art to pixel art on Deluxe Paint III, moving to more familiar ground. While I never dabbled much with ASCII art, I used to draw a lot of pictures and make animations on DP3 when Amiga was my main computer.
I remembered there was some kind of grid functionality in DP3, which I though would be useful since I had drafted the picture on a squared paper. The grid in DP3 works quite differently from what I remembered. Instead of toggling a grid visible or invisible it just restricts the locations where one can draw. After a bit of head scratching I remembered how I used to use it: I set up an eight pixel grid, drew a single pixel at each grid intersection, corresponding to the line intersections on my graph paper and got as a result a kind of dotted graph paper. I used the beige colour so I could get rid of the markers by changing the colour to background colour when I'm done.
Here is the draft so far, showing the grid technique:
The picture is geometrical but made of sinuous lines and all the snake parts should be approximately same thickness until they diminish into sharp tails at the end. The initial attempt using the beige colour did not really work out due to miscalculation. Adding small integers is hard! I picked red as another disposable colour and just drew over it, getting the basic form approximately right.
DP3 does not have layers or features for moving picture parts effectively (selecting a brush doesn't count in my opinion). Once you press a pixel on the canvas, it's there and there is just one level of undo. That's why I did not bother correcting mistakes while I was working on the initial draft, and instead just kept on drawing over the old pixels, letting the canvas get messy. Time to clean up will come later.
Then there was the issue of getting a DP3 drawing posted here. I found IFF 2 PNG web tool, which converts Amiga IFF pics to PNG. While I usually prefer local tools, I decided to use this one because any command-line tool offers me an opportunity for shell scripting and doing anything but drawing. With the limited time available the plan was simply to draw, get it converted as quickly as possible, and stay away from any tool tinkering.
My plan today was to get the outline drawn and cleaned up, maybe even anti-aliased, but alas, the weather was nice and I decided to go bicycling instead. And at the evening I'll be meeting some friends, so this was it for today.
--
pv@smolpub.mail.kapsi.fi