In my search for fun, unique, and satisfying online drawing tools, I stumbled on Rob Manuel's ZX81 Draw by serendipitous accident, and in a secret way. What happened was: I saw him posting drawings he was making with this tool on Bluesky and asked him if he was doing that in-browser, and then he kindly sent me a secret link, because the thing isn't intended for public use, at the time of writing.
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| Rob's frightening image of a dog. |
So, lucky me, I have secured for myself a glorious new tool. And the great thing about this one is that it can very quickly strain my eyes. Yay!
I'm not familiar with the ZX81, a British home computer model released in 1981, but as you can see, it has a particular display aesthetic, comprised of some interesting black and white glyphs that can rapidly create a sickening kind of magic eye puzzle texture, if arranged optimally, that boggles the senses.
You're seeing the gorgeous art it's capable of here, and I don't think it's too bad just looking at these images, but drawing them made me feel genuinely nauseous, so I think this tool may be one to use in short stretches.
Fortunately, I am a fighter. I am strong, and I can endure such computer-based illnesses if it means drawing beautiful images that anyone on Earth would surely be delighted to see. And you know what else is great about these pictures? They're like, six measly kilobytes. I love that for them.
This reminds me of FriendlyWare intro pc diskette videogame "graphics". I'm going to tell my kids that is smiledog.jpeg.
ReplyDeletethey look so cool and fun to make but i can see why it would hurt your eyes to draw them, if i look at them for too long i start to see dots in places where there's none. have you tried printing them ? i imagine what's hurting my eyes it's the contrast between the very bright white parts and the very dark black ones. or maybe is the fact that they're actually just a bunch of little squares, then i guess it would still make us dizzy on paper ,,
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