| > drawing with joysticks! I mean, it's a rare artist who was sketching on their computer in the early 80s (the "keyboard and joystick" era of micros.) The usual workflow was to draw your art on some grid-paper and then plot it onto the screen — either in a paintbrush program, or even more simply, by typing the numbers into a text file to produce a PBM/PGM/PPM image, and then running a tool to convert that to whatever format you need. (In some workflows, the artist themselves could be working entirely on paper, leaving the plotting to a data-entry intern.) With such a workflow, clumsiness of input method doesn't really matter — it's not impinging on your creative process, since the creative process is already over by the time you sit down at the computer screen. Why, then, did paintbrush software even exist? Well, it could be helpful for finishing touch-ups to plotted input (especially hand-dithering to suit a given system's palette — effectively the "color grading" of the early digital era.) And, of course, paintbrush software was helpful for quickly banging out "programmer art" mock-ups to use in your game/app, before an artist comes in to replace it with something better. By the late 80s, 'serious' digital painting software for professional artists to create in came about. But said software either shipped only for systems that had a mouse (e.g. the Mac); or the software package itself shipped with a mouse (as in the case of PC Paint.) So "doing digital painting with a joystick" was never really a thing. |