Where did you experience and render your first pixel painting? Mine was at age 11 on my Commodore 64. I drew Indiana Jones with the cursor keys and had no way to save the image to my 1541 drive. If only I had remembered to take a Polaroid snapshot. Little did I know, like so many of us, I'd make a living rendering pixel paintings for nearly 3 decades while riding the waves of technological and artistic pairings of software and hardware.
In the early ‘80s our lives were forever changed as artists by a small company in Newbury, England. Art and technology were fused together and being released as the Quantel Paintbox. The Weather Channel placed the very first order after discovering it at NAB in New York, 1981. In the mid ‘90s I joined The Weather Channel Art Department, and Harriet was my new best friend.
As the broadcast industry grew so did our access to digital tools. Every couple of years we would be introduced to another game changer like Discreet Logic’s Flint/Flame/Inferno/Fire. TWC bought two Flints and one Fire initially. One day I asked my friend if I would get the chance to learn how to transition over to the Flint from the Quantel. His dry response was priceless: “read the manual,” he said.
That night I pored through the 6 inch thick binder. The next day I started the transition. From this experience I was able to do the same moving forward by reading manuals and watching VHS tapes. The Masters of Visual Effects by Puffin Designs and Brian Maffitt’s Total Training proved to be my favorite sets of training thus far.
One day while waiting for a render to finish I called Australia. I wanted to know what exactly was the D1 Desktop? It was the key to transitioning completely over to a Mac platform and gaining access to so many tools rather than using one rigid set like those found on black boxes.
By 2002 I upgraded my home studio with a Blackmagic Design Decklink card, Sony deck and monitor, After Effects, and Final Cut Pro. The gear had changed, but the end product was the same as when I was 11. Digital art.
Let’s get back to Quantel for a moment. See below what artist David Hockney thought of this new form of artistic wizardry. His reaction reminds me of my typography professor from college when QuarkXPress introduced H&Js.
Enjoy the full Quantel history here: http://quantelpaintbox.com/index.html