Project Description

INKTOBER 2023 Day #5: (BIT) MAP.

“Not a ‘map’, but a ‘bitmap’. Yeah. This one was tedious. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy with the off-the-wall interpretation, but, ouch. There may have been an easier way to pull this off. I probably DIDN’T need to grid the page off every sixteenth of an inch (which I think technically makes this drawing 16 bits), I probably could have ‘winged’ it and achieved a similar effect. But, I don’t tend to operate like that.
I played my fair share of bitmap-based video games on consoles and computers growing up (my first video game console was a Playstation 1 I bought my senior year of college, so if it wasn’t a pc game, I played at friends’ houses when I was younger). There’s actually a lot of independent game developers working on modern, retro-style, pixel-based games these days, and I’ve seen a decent amount of high-quality pixel art and animations that achieve amazing effects with limited definition and color palettes. It might be fun to attempt a PMD game in this style someday.
Working on this, I had a sudden flashback to elementary school. I can’t quite remember what grade, maybe third? We were just getting access to a computer for the first time (yeah, I’m that old), and one of the things we got to play around with was using basic lines of code to ‘draw’ something. I think we were given sheets of graph paper to hand draw our images first, so we could figure out what commands to input for what lines. I thought it was cool but I was disappointed that I couldn’t incorporate more detail. If I remember correctly, I attempted an image of a Veritech fighter from my favorite cartoon at the time ‘Robotech’. It was a cool experience, and it’s amazing to see how far digital art technology has advanced in my lifetime…and I’m grateful that I don’t have to know how to code to work digitally today.”

Are you enjoying these monkey-filled pen and ink illustrations? Would you like to see even more of them, and be able to hold them in your very own hands? Then grab yourself a copy of my Inktober art book INKLINGS: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1733734716?ref_=ast_author_dp