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This is where I began my computer graphics career, on a little brown home computer called the Commodore 64 (also known as C64 or "the breadbox"). The C64 was a little piece of computing history that set new standards when it was released. It could display graphics with an incredible 16 colours, it had lifelike sound courtesy of the SID chip, and most importantly - it had the biggest games catalogue at the time.
Our family got our machine in 1987. Now, one cool thing about the C64 was that it was relatively easy to program. My brother and I started doing our own little games and programs on it within days of unpacking the thing. And since I had been drawing since I was a preschooler, I naturally began doing artwork on it.
The Star Wars image above was one of the first images I made. I've been a Star Wars-fan all my life, it's funny now to see that my first 3D-animation and my first Amiga image also referenced Star Wars. On this page is a small selection of the work I did on the C64, made in the timespan between 1987 and 1991.
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In 1989 we joined an underground computer phenomenom that is now called 'the scene'. We discovered that there people sharing our creative interests, and that they were programming technical demonstrations (called demos) that they were swapping through mail (postal-mail, silly). They also met in schools over weekends to compete in programming the best demos and making the best graphics.
These groups had different names and all the members had nicknames (or handles). We were almost like rappers, but not soo cool since we were computer nerds. My handle was Sparkler, and our group was called Megastyle (of course, all this is really embarrassing now that I look back on it!).
The logo is one of the many I did for our group.
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This is a picture I did for a demo-competition in Trondheim. I found the image in a sociology book, and liked the lighting and composition. The picture won first prize, which was 10 floppy disks (a crappy price, even at that time).
The picture is called L.S.D., even though she's obviously holding a syringe. It shows how worldly I was at the time.
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A portrait of Madonna, which I think we used it in one of our demos. Someone later accused me of scanning my images, even though there was no way I could have done that - there were no scanners yet!
One of the reasons why my images look like they do, was because of the software I used. I used a piece of drawing software on the C64 that my brother had hacked into working with a mouse. Some of my later C64 images were also done on our Amiga (using Deluxe Paint), and then converted to the C64.
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Two small pictures I did. I picked my motives from many different places, going for pictures I though would look good on the C64 - or that I thought would be fun (or easy) to draw. Looking back on some of them, they were obvious choices for a pubescent boy.
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One of the intro images from the last demo we made. The demo was called Seal of Focalor, and touched on the theme of the seven deadly sins. While most demo-groups moved into more and more technical stuff (like vector-graphics), I was trying to push our demos more in the direction of film.
At the time of this demo, I was growing tired of trying to wedge my ambitions to do animated film into these small computers. Now I wanted to do the real thing, but it would still be many many years before I made that happen.
Below is the last logo I did, and a fitting one as well.
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All the images on this website are (c) copyrighted Rune Spaans and their respective owners. Any use of the materials on this site other than for private, non-commercial viewing purposes is strictly prohibited. If you want to use some of these images for promotional or editorial reasons, please contact me. | |
Next project: Amiga Artwork
