🌞   🌛
Rene van Belzen

Art

  • As Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the eighties have taught us, cats can without most clothes, except the most essential, like a hat or a cane.
    🎨🐱👨‍💻🕹️👾

    Commodore 64 multi-color bitmap painting of an antromorphized cat behind a pile of clothes

  • Sometimes limitation breeds creativity; usually frustration, though. The latter is often left out, rationalizing it as “part of the process.”

    Drawn, but not copied 😇, from a photo. Six-color palette based on C64 colors. Drawn in ibisPaint X in roughly 5 hours, including a failed attempt.
    🎨

    illustration of a baby

  • While sketching this kitten I wondered how I could do away with all those lines. So I tried to eliminate as much as I dared. I’m sure more could be removed still. However, now the result was pretty “bland.” I suppose color has to do the brunt of the work, and there is too little of that.
    🎨🐱

    drawing of stylized kitten with as few lines as possible Animated GIF of drawing process

  • I find it always such a surprise how a pixel art drawing I made subtly (or sometimes radically) changes to conform to the rigors of the C64 multicolor bitmap.

    Other than that, I used some of the edging techniques (sharp, lost and soft edges). So there’s that too. Happy 😊 camper here!
    🎨👽👨‍💻🕹️👾

    Commodore 64 multipaint drawing of an anime version of Rick Deccard

  • Searching on Flickr for Creative Commons photos of kittens I found this cute black and white one. I used it as reference for my C64 hi-res bitmap pixel art drawing.

    Sometimes less color is better. Especially if the one depicted is staring into your soul.
    🎨👨‍💻👾🕹️🐱😈

    Commodore 64 hi-res pixel art drawing of a black and white kitten

  • I didn’t get to experiment with edges. Still, I drew something I love, so that’s good.

    Maybe advice from an oil painter doesn’t translate all that well to pixel art. Pixel art has more in common with decorative art (like embroidery) than with traditional art you can hang on a wall.
    🎨🐱👨‍💻🕹️👾

    Commodore 64 multipaint illustration of two kittens, one sniffing a flower

  • Sometimes (read: often) I get distracted by an interesting bit of art-making fundamentals, try to apply it, then get totally side-stepped by the intracies of drawing from a cute photo, forgetting what I wanted to try out in the first place. The creative process never seems to go in a straight line.
    🎨

    rough sketch in blue line of two kittens

  • Public domain now?
    🎨👨‍💻🕹️👾

    Commodore 64 multicolor illustration of a cartoon mouse holding a piece of cheese and a drink animated GIF of drawing process

  • It is said all dogs go to the Good Place.

    Drawn in ibisPaint X on 9th gen iPad with first gen Apple Pencil.
    🐶🎨

    Illustration of a winged dog with halo on green surface

  • I suppose the lesson to be learned here is:

    Don’t look into the spiral, or you’ll go cuckoo, bananas, Dada

    A quick peek is no problem, though.
    🎨👨‍💻🕹️👾

    Commodore 64 hires bitmap image showing a spiral and a confused artist

  • Another day, another cat drawing. This time our more blocky version of a feline fellow creature. Sketch in ibisPaint X and final drawing in Commodore 64 multicolor bitmap (160 x 200 resolution, 16 colors). If I could, I’d knit him a cozy sweater.
    🐱🎨👨‍💻🕹️👾

    illustration of a stylized cat with chunk in blocked letters written underneath Commodore 64 multicolor bitmap image of a chunky cat illustration

  • I think I’m starting to grasp how to draw in C64 multicolor. You get three colors that can be used anywhere, and per 8 by 8 pixels block you get to pick another color out of 16 possible colors. Careful placement of the pixels is key. If you do it right, you can have a very colorful image
    🎨👨‍💻🕹️👾

    cheeky multicolor illustration on the Commodore 64, stating that boys will be boys

  • Another day, another cat drawing for the old Commodore 64
    😻 🎨 👨‍💻 🕹️ 👾

    Commodore 64 multicolor drawing of a blue cat on a red background

  • I reworked an older self-portrait that I made last year as a pixel art drawing, and turned it into an image on the Commodore 64. I like that the limited color palette doesn’t seem to limit me as much as it used to. It takes some effort (well, a lot of effort), but I think it was worth the time.
    🎨 👨‍💻 🕹️ 👾

    Commodore 64 multicolor selfie

  • Here are some of the steps I took to create a multicolor pixel art drawing of a cat.

    grayscale image of a cat drawn in ibisPaint X

    drawn in ibisPaint X in 4 colors

    colored pixel art of the same cat in Pixaki

    traced and redrawn in Pixaki

    colored pixel art of the cat display in VICE C64

    made into C64 runnable multicolor art with MultiPaint, loaded into VICE C64

    It’s a process, taking many hours to complete. I think I’m improving.

    👨‍💻🎨

  • I fired up my art app and sculpted on a canvas the size of a retro-computer’s text character (8 pixel wide and 8 pixels high). I had to struggle, because the app wanted it to look nicer than it really was.

    I suppose you can already guess what it represents. You can do a lot in 64 bits of data 👨‍💻🎨

    8 by 8 sprite of a black cat animated GIF of drawing process of an 8 by 8 sprite of a black cat

  • I would prefer owning a Mac, but I simply can’t rationalize the “Apple tax.” I used to be Mac or Die. A computer is more like a way to access the Internet nowadays, anyway 👨‍💻👾

    Cartoon drawing in C64 multicolor format.

  • It’s all very technical, this Commodore 64 multicolor mode. I made a special 2x1 grid in my iPad pixel editor to help me, but still I need to check in an actual multicolor editor if I made a mistake. Anyway, I’m improving as a C64 pixel artist, and that’s very cool 👨‍💻

    concept and C64 multicolor drawings of a sunny day in nature

  • Since I took the picture myself, I can copy it, I guess.

    self-portrait in Commodore 64 multicolor

  • Creating something colorful that can be displayed on a Commodore 64 by loading and running a file involved a lot of (impossible to automate) creative steps. It took me around 4 hours for this simple drawing of my cat Aziz. 👨‍💻

    original drawing in ibisPaint X at 320 by 200 pixels multicolor version with the Multipaint application loading screen in VICE C64 of the binary file containing the multicolor image multicolor image being displayed in VICE C64