Recreating Amiga Art Lost to Time

[intric8]

I recently decided to go through my entire collection of Amazing Computing magazines. I have what I think is a nearly complete set. I recognize that I'm not going to hang onto all of the mags forever. I actually had to wear rubber gloves because there was a tiny bit of mildew on some of the covers, and I they were even making me sneeze. Not great. I acquired these years ago and they weren't all stored in pristine conditions.

But I wanted to go through all of it to see if there were any issues in particular I'd want to set aside later whenever I do decide to part with the 30 pounds (or more) of magazines. It's one of my all-time faves because it was written by professionals for other professionals - not kids playing games (although there were usually 1-2 pages of game reviews in each issue). The core focus of the mag was hardware, professional software of all types imaginable, event coverage and even programming.

One issue in particular instantly caught my eye. (Obviously I've looked at all of these before but not with this specific focus in mind.) It was an issue from April 1989, and featured some artwork on the cover of the magazine that had been awarded in an art contest at AmiEXPO in New York. All of the entries - over 250 of them - had been submitted from USA, Hawaii and Canada. Not sure why they called out Hawaii separately like that except maybe to focus on distance and challenges to the mail service back then. I'm not sure.

Anyway, the 2nd place winner of the 2D category was featured on the cover - not the 1st place winner! And the 2nd place piece is simply bad ass.

That WATCH!

The piece in question features 2 totally different illustrations of a digital watch in a single composition. It was created by DeWayne Stauffer on an Amiga 1000 with 2.5 MB of RAM and Deluxe Paint II. He called it, simply, Screen.

I was instantly mesmerized by the image and spent a good amount of time looking for a digital version of the file anywhere online. Usually these things found their way onto some sort of PD art disk back in the day. Especially images with this level of incredible draftsmanship.

The 1st place winner is pretty nice and quite painterly, too, which I appreciate. But holy smoke the watch(es) blows me away. To be honest I don't fully understand what's going on in the image, but I think the "pen" is moving pixels into place on the pixelated isometric LCD screen. Meanwhile a "3D" representation of the watch taunts us all to the right. It's almost as if DeWayne is saying, "Look, I'm doing pixel art in Deluxe Paint!" while a fully gorgeous 3D watch is floating next to him for reference. It's a trip.

After failing to find it anywhere I decided I'd attempt to recreate it on my own Amiga 1000 (with no deadline). Since I knew he created it on an A1K and was in the US, I figured it was extremely likely he did this total masterpiece in 32 colors at 320x200.

My colors are a bit brighter but keep in mind print images often become darker than what's viewed on screens. But I'll keep tweaking things as I go. I wish I'd paid better attention to my palette organization. One of the downsides of how DP's palette works is once you settle on a color you can't really change it after your image is made - not unless you want to change every instance of that color in the image, too. It can be a powerful feature, but I sometimes wish I could re-org the color swatches and they not hurt the image. I should re-read the manual and make sure I'm not an idiot. Oh well. It's fine.

I have a long way to go, but I feel pretty confident I'll get it done in the next few weeks/months in my off hours. It won't be perfect and if the original IS out there somewhere I'd quickly stop this project. While I've already taken photos of the magazine and shared the image here, wouldn't you rather look at a Deluxe Paint recreation on your own computer (ideally a CRT if you have one) in a way that would have been viewed 35 years ago? I think so, too. That being said, I'm going to use DP III and not II.

I'll share more when I'm done.

I also want to share with you guys the 2 pieces for the 2023 10Marc Art Contest SO MUCH (the contest was put on-hold while Doug bought a house and moved) but I don't want to steal the thunder from his stream. I don't expect to win anything, but I had a lot of fun putting those 2 pieces together last year. I bet his announcements will finally get published in the next week or two.

[bnilsson]

Hi intric8

Cool project. Those images are awesome, and im looking forward to your results with them.

Im sure you are aware already of this video of something similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4

That IFF is now in my collection of classical Amiga art.

Also I have been working on the Andy Warhol / Debbie Harry portrait here: https://github.com/bni/awdh
I wrote some custom code to get started, but I sort of gave up a while ago. Maybe I will take it up again sometime.

[intric8]

Hi bnilsson

Yes indeed that video you link to was a fantastic piece of work. I loved watching it (as did apparently over 1M other people - wow!). I also grabbed the IFF at the time.

Your project for recreating the Andy Warhol image is a great one. Like you, I wouldn't use GrafiCraft and would move right on over to at least DP2 or 3. (3 for me.)

That's not an easy one to do because you're looking at something photographic in nature. If I were to do it, I'd probably start in Photoshop and index the colors and probably eyeball the colors at first - especially the red and yellow. I could create a Color Table starting at 32 colors, but to be honest I wouldn't be surprised if the image was 16. So much of what we see online for that image includes scanlines on top of everything, which creates more colors than were in the original image. Except in her face/hair.

So if I were to recreate the palette, I'd attempt 16 first and see how far that got me. I'd use red, yellow, black, and a nice healthy range of blues and blue-grays. I bet I could build that image and get it pretty close with just 16. Anyway, once the color table is chosen, you can export Amiga IFFs from Photoshop (even today). However, truth be told I have WAY more luck exporting GIF images.

Then, on the Amiga side, using AD Pro to convert the image to IFF (32 colors or less, since I use my A1000 for most things). Once that's done open it up in Deluxe Paint III and do a LOT of cleanup work and tweak the colors to taste.

Honestly the hard part is selecting the source image to start from, and then cropping/resizing it to 320x200 properly before creating your custom color table.

It's an interesting idea!! Such an iconic image.

And Debbie was such a total fox back then. Fun fact I just checked: Heart of Glass has been watched on YouTube almost 500M times in the past 15 years. Bam!

[intric8]

After thinking about this further, I'm not sure I'd worry about putting the red and yellow in the palette in such a way as to recreate the workbench menus being taken over with yellow/red. That would be "bonus points" but maybe purists would demand it in a final piece.

[Shot97]

For my Menace review I read from this issue as they had reviewed it, and actually I thought it was one of the most unprofessional reviews I had ever read. It screamed of someone struggling mightily to fill a word count. It almost read as if the games publisher had written it for them, and regardless of if you agree with their overall sentiments on the game or not, a puff piece is anything but professional. Anyway, I had collected pics of this article on art, as I usually collect anything interesting in the magazines besides the actual review itself, but it's all about the flow as well as time considerations, and if something "fits" with that moment. Because of their poorly written review for Menace it didn't feel right to show the article on art, but perhaps someday I'll return to it. I would actually call the cover for this one of their very few quality covers, Amazing Computing in an overall sense had the worst covers of any Amiga magazine I can think of, and really the insides weren't particularly good either in terms of presentation. I would say it's because they were designing the entire magazine on a Macintosh, and I'll go with Info everyday in terms of magazines designed on an actual computer, Info being on the Amiga. Amazing Computing doing an Amiga magazine on a Mac is a testament to its bland presentation, and really the only thing that makes this cover stand out is that there's 35mm pics of an Amiga screen on it. In terms of the color, the fonts, that "art" of the hard disk platters, that stuff is typical of them, and not good. That said, beautiful art indeed, and love the commitment to recreating it.