I’m going to ignore Nvidea’s CEO charged statement people shouldn’t learn how to code anymore. I think BBC Basic is an excellent language for someone like myself, AI be damned!

A “little” thing as a broken iPad won’t stop me from making art. I made this when the iPad was almost gone.

And the other piece I made with a PETSCII editor on my RPi, based on a piece I did earlier this month.

Not having a backup for my Raspberry Pi makes me a bit nervous, as it should
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This was taxing my iPad. Youtube in Safari with adblocker as picture in picture on top of a drawing app. The strokes had to be placed tactically to allow for overall sluggishness. Also, very distractive drawing and watching a video.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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Public domain now?
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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.
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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.
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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
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Another day, another cat drawing for the old Commodore 64
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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.
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Here are some of the steps I took to create a multicolor pixel art drawing of a cat.

drawn in ibisPaint X in 4 colors

traced and redrawn in Pixaki

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.

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Making room for two text screens, so I can use them for buffering is great, but running it from C64 Basic is one ugly hack, and slow too. But I’ve done it, which is great, since I learned a lot from it, and that was the whole point here. The code I keep, in case I need (some of) it 👨‍💻

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 👨‍💻🎨

Okay, I have a Basic loader with M/L code that enables a screen buffer and has a handy relocatable M/L routine at $C000 that copies 1024 bytes. Bits 4 - 7 of $D018 control which part of memory is used to display the screen. Now I have all I need for moving a block of characters in C64 Basic, right? 👨‍💻

In my previous post in which I moved a box across the screen with a Basic program, I wanted to use a screen buffer. The default screen location starts in memory at $0400 (1024 decimal), and we can move the screen in units of 1024 bytes. The next location would be $0800 (2048 decimal), which is where … read more

With all the blogging I do daily, I wanted to automate correct capitalization. I reworked an shortcut that no longer worked to a working state. Select text, share, pick one, paste.

• all lower case
• UPPER CASE
• Title Case in Case You Want It
• Capitalize A Okay
• Sentence. After each. Sentence.

I was wondering how to move a collection of characters (e.g. a box) across a Commodore 64 text screen. It’s rather easy to do this destructively. In Basic, I wrote something that horizontally moves a 3-by-3 character rectangle constructed out of PETSCII characters. 10 rem *** 11 rem *** setup … read more