This past weekend I came down with a nasty chest cold. So bad that it has sidelined me from work today. Not the end of the world, just super annoying. I had in the back of my mind, "Well now I can try to finish Star Control!" I did master more of the ships and got a very good feel for the controls, but my head is too foggy to really give the full scenarios the attention they require.
So, after resting, I started to move software over to the A2000 - software I I thought I might want to use for designing some logos. Turns out I don't have any vector drawing programs except a font creator (which is cool, but not what I'm after right now). I have crates and crates of boxed programs, but they are all raster drawing programs, 3D modeling and rendering programs, desktop publishing programs, music composing and mixing, broadcast TV production... It's borderline crazy. But not really any dedicated vector programs from what I can see - like Adobe Illustrator. Unfortunately that was never made for the Amiga.
At first I went ahead and installed PageStream. This is really more a professional layout program for creating sophisticated print jobs - from newspapers to magazines to really kick-butt looking documents. The only "downside" is that this professional software is set to hi-res. So you really need a "flicker fixer" which is a video de-interlacer to display the program without it jiggling all over the screen like a train is cruising right below your desk. Made me realize I need to go look in my pile of cards to see if I have a 2320 board hidden in there somewhere. But until I source an Amber chip for my 2000, Pagestream is not going to be a program I'll be using. It makes my eyes bleed.
So, I moved over to Deluxe Paint III. I have a C= pin that I used as a reference and started trying to make a logo based off of it.
- The beginnings of a Commodore logo using Deluxe Paint III.
I then started to do the alternating pixel trick to give the logo some texture.
- Textureized. Before there were "lickable icons" on OS X, there were shiny things made with pixel art found elsewhere. ;) I discovered well after the fact that there is a way to customize some of the tools to pump out alternating pixels (yes!) but I'd already finished doing it all by hand. Next time.
After downing a couple of mugs of macha green tea, I was up for bigger challenge - the boing ball.
Keep in mind, the tools in DPIII are fairly limiting. When you've got 30 years of Photoshop experience, DP can be baffling at times. But those limitations force you to think creatively to accomplish tasks.
With the C= logo, I create a black filled circle, then a blue one inside it, then another black one, then white. The ribbon was a lot more straight forward to create. Making sure everything was pixel perfect from math-wize was the main challenge there to ensure the angles matched.
- The beginnings of a boing ball, but not the end.
With the Boing ball it was very hard and really more of a puzzle. After creating the outer circle I had to kind of create rough guesses as to where the squares would go, which are all curved and essentially follow the shape of vertical orange slices. Then, I had to - by hand - begin to draw out the curves. I can see now in hindsight that my center square and bulge needs to be increased slightly on both sides, which means I'll have to redraw nearly every square to accommodate the bigger center bulge. But it's close.
I quit after getting this far as my cold simply wiped me out. Nice, relaxing way to pass the time, though.