Commodore 64 Artwork

About the project

This is where I started creating computer graphics, on a little beige home computer called the Commodore 64 (also known as the C64 or "breadbin"). The C64 was a little computer that set new standards when it was released. It could display graphics with a vivid 16 colours, it had impressive synthesized sound courtesy of the SID chip, and it also had the biggest games catalogue at the time.

Our family purchased the machine in 1987, halfway through its life. Now, one cool thing about the C64 was that it was relatively easy to start programming on it. My brother and I were doing little games and programs on it within days of unpacking the thing. And I naturally began doing artwork on it.

On this page is a small selection of the work I did on the C64, made in the timespan between 1987 and 1991.The Star Wars image below was one of the first images I made. I've been a Star Wars-fan all my life, it's funny to see that my first 3D-animation and my first Amiga image also was from Star Wars.

In 1989 me and my brother fell into a computer subculture now called 'the scene'. We discovered other people sharing our creative interests, and they were programming technical demonstrations (called demos) that they swapped with eachother through lettermail. They also met in schools over weekends to compete in demo making, trying to show who got the best programming, music or graphic skills.

These groups had different names and all the members had nicknames (or handles). We were almost like rappers, but not quite as cool since we were computer nerds! My handle was Sparkler, and our group was called Megastyle. Most of the artwork below was from when I was in the demo scene.

I was very fortunate to have a brother who knew programming, he hacked piece of drawing software on the C64 to work with a mouse. That made it a lot easier for me, since most other artist were using joysticks or keyboards to do artwork. Some of my later C64 images were also done on our Amiga (using Deluxe Paint), and then transferred pixel by pixel to the C64.

Lately, I've started dabbling with C64 artwork again, but this time I'm using my own iPad Pro paint program; Redux Painter.

See similar projects tagged with: Personal Early Illustration