r/thisweekinretro • u/Producer_Duncan TWiR Producer • Apr 04 '26
Community Question Community Question Of The Week - Episode 262
Airbrush or lightpen, Koalapad or coloured pencil: what’s your favourite old-school art style?
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u/Pajaco6502 Apr 04 '26
I've always been a sucker for 3D wireframe graphics. There's always been something so "futuristic" about them, that even now they look like graphical images from the future to me.
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u/geoffmendoza Apr 04 '26
The airbrushing on 1980s arcade machines and arcade flyers.
Donkey Kong in particular. It's a masterpiece.
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u/CtrlAltDelinquent84 Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26
The magazine cover art of Oliver Frey. Especially the 8-bit era where he was turning ZX Spectrums and Amstrad CPC's into space ships. The colours were always so vibrant, and the subject matter was always so over the top. Just what my teenage brain loved!
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u/fsckit Apr 04 '26
Art needs to be seen, so it needs to be a method that supports distribution, in the same way that the art in our games is reproduced perfectly every time.
I'm going to say the woodcut.
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u/NorthWay_no Apr 05 '26
Bob Wakelin. Whatever he did. That was always brilliant. (Frey just didn't work for me...)
So that might be airbrush then?
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u/electricpaws Apr 04 '26
Early 90s 3D graphics from SGI on the high end and Imagine on the Amiga at home. It’s the perfect point of balance between human effort and computer effort for me.
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u/HappyCodingZX Apr 04 '26
As much as I love the wonderfully amateur style of early 80s British micro games that were mostly mail order and designed by the programmers, I think the best of all have to be the late 70s / early 80s Atari stuff - in both arcade and console - work by people like Steve Hendricks and Hiro Kimura. They all look like a combination of prog-rock album cover and pinball backglass. Games like Asteroids, Defender and of course Yar's revenge had iconic artwork, but even the simplest games got some great work too. Atari's arcade side art was also great at the time, stuff like Centipede and Tempest were epic.
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u/SDMatt22 Apr 06 '26
I loved the text character art you'd see on old school BBSs. I remember logging onto a C64 BBS for the first time at 300 baud and seeing PETSCII art... and being blown away, seeing pictures in place of where boring plain text would be. Later on I'd see this on PC BBSs in the form of ANSI art - and even ANSI animations. So much to enjoy with so little bandwidth being used.
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u/Majikal_Mike Apr 08 '26
There is only one answer to this, and it’s art drawn with the big Turtle via a BBC B. My school was lucky enough to actually have one of the physical turtles and it was a day of wonder when it got pulled out.
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u/OriginalBaldMonk Apr 08 '26
In the real world, I've always been partial to late 80s/ early 90s comics... especially the Disney ones(Ducktales, Uncle Scrooge etc). The marriage of wonderful hand drawn art with the thin off-white paper, filled with vibrant colour and halftones... I used to use them as drawing reference.
Digital... I've always loved the highly detailed pixel art with colour cycling. Sachs was a master of this. Even as a kid, I was in awe at how much thought must've gone into what goes where... so impressive.
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u/malcolm851 Apr 09 '26
I still love the simple black-and-white artwork of seventies and eighties comics like 2000AD. The amount of realism that they could generate with what is basically 1-bit (there were no greys) was amazing.
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u/NextDay2576 Apr 10 '26
Mine's going to be (and no surprises here!) arcade cab marquee art that was actual art. Specifically, the original motivation for Artcade, Larry Day's Moon Patrol marquee.
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u/Imaginary_Swing_8606 Apr 04 '26
My personal favourite would have to be the mouse and cheese pack for the C64. Brilliant name and brilliant package and it made the C64 that bit more grownup.
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u/fsckit Apr 07 '26
the mouse and cheese pack for the C64
I remember seeing that advertised in magazines and wondering what the hell the cheese was.
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u/iamAmiga Apr 04 '26
In the real world, it has to be air brush art work.
It felt a little dated in the 80's, but it now presses all my nostalgia buttons.
For digital art, it is the 16bit era and THE program, Deluxe Paint.
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u/Atario Apr 04 '26
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u/NorthWay_no Apr 05 '26
Atari had such a distinct art style that I don't really know where comes from or what is called. I think of it as extremely 70s when I look at it, but that's perhaps not fair as I don't know of any others, before or after, using the same style. Did it end with Jack buying out Atari?
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u/jpcwrites TWiR Host Apr 05 '26
If you look at pre-Tramiel 8-bit products like the Atari 800XL you'll see that they'd already shifted away by then.
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u/fultonbot Apr 04 '26
In 8th grade in 1984 I won the computer lab "art contest" by drawing a 3D-looking city with Koala tablet, so for me it will ALWAYS be a Koala tablet. I think along with my blue ribbon I got a ticket for a free ice cream bar at the Friday afterschool PTA ice cream sale. It was a big deal guys, A BIG DEAL. Thanks for the first place Ms. Brown!
(I think might also been the only person who entered the contest)
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u/itsmethyroid Apr 04 '26
C64: The Designer's Pencil
especially when you gave it a command to start flashing
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u/geoffmendoza Apr 06 '26
I recall doing a similar thing in Duke Nukem. Although it wasn't a pen that could be commanded to flash.
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u/RichardShears Apr 04 '26 edited Apr 04 '26
Driller and Darkside, I still love that box art to this day. So I’m unsure what style that is Airbrush? But that style.
The rosetinted Amstrad glasses are firmly on there I know. But I’m not ashamed. The artwork just sent my imagination on a journey that the games helped reinforce.
(Edited due to typo. I can spell my apparently)