The micro-age answer to Michelangelo?
"WHAT'S the point?" said a learned friend when I told
him I was painting pictures on a micro. "You might as well
stick to real brushes and canvas - you'll get a much better effect".
Well, yes I suppose so. But then again, you could have told
Michelangelo to stop messing about with a chisel and a block of
marble - or scoffed at the early photographers experimenting with
their new-fangled cameras.
The point is that you can use just about any kind of medium
to produce something artistic, so why not a computer?
There are quite a few methods to do this — a light pen is perhaps
the one that most accurately captures the feel of drawing.
Paintbox, however, uses keyboard, graphics tablet and joysticks
to create images — with very interesting results once you get
used to painting by proxy.
You gel a choice of Modes 0, 1 or 2 but I found the first two
difficult to work with as the palette or bar of colours at the
top of the screen was so tiny. And anyway you are limited to just
a few colours.
So I began in Mode 2, and after several minutes cursing the
cassette player, the micro and the program itself I discovered
that in order to get an image it helps if you don't try painting
in black on a black screen!
Perhaps the programmer could have worked it so that the cursor's
colour defaults to white at the beginning.
There are lots of facilities. It's easy to create geometrical
shapes and lines by pressing just one or two keys and moving the
cursor around.
But even better, from an artist's point of view, is the command
that enables you to build up tones — combining several colours
by using a dot pattern instead of solid or flat areas of colour.
I found that using joystick and keyboard together was the best
way to control the cursor-joystick for general areas of colour,
with a freer style and keyboard for finer detail.
Pressing keys 1 and 2 alters the speed in the keyboard mode,
useful if you want to do carefully controlled intricate detail.
But why, oh why, did this command have to be put next to the Escape
key, which wipes out the image on the screen?
I'd spent more than an hour on my masterpiece and was putting
on the finishing touches when I accidcntly hit Escape and the
whole thing disappeared.
Surely it wouldn't have been too difficult to arrange things
so that you have to press Escape twice before the screen clears?
The instruction manual is fairly comprehensive and easy to understand.
The manual claims that the program lends itself to serious applications
such as computer aided design but from my experience I think this
might be asking too much.
I don't have a graphics tablet, so perhaps it is unfair of me
to judge it on that score - certainly keyboard and joysticks are
not able to reproduce images as accurately as CAD demands.
But Paintbox would really come into its own in the classroom.
It has always been one of my complaints that arts and sciences
are kept too much apart, and inevitably that leads to specialisation
in one field with little knowledge about the other.
Using a computer in the art class might convince the person
who is bored to tears by aggressive arcade games (as I am) that
there is a lot more potential for creativity on a computer than
is at first apparent.
Also, the type who curls up in horror at the thought of sitting
in front of a drawing board might just be tempted by the prospect
of using a micro.
If you want to paint traditional style works of art then stick
to brush and canvas, as this package can be no substitute.
But there is a lot of scope for experimenting with images using
a computer, and Paintbox provides a flexible way of doing just
that.
Every school should have this program.
Heather Sheldrick
