Dan Harkless' "Hold on Newt!"

Date:  

September 25, 1990

Tool:  

Mac Paint on an Apple Macintosh Plus running System 6

Info:  

Back in 1990, the first lab assignment for the first course in UCI's ICS curriculum, ICS 21, was to draw a picture using Mac Paint and the mouse. You could draw anything you wanted — I chose to draw this scene from Aliens, one of my favorite films.

I was pretty proud of myself (with my poorly implemented mind's eye and visual memory retrieval) for drawing Newt and the alien from memory, without any visual reference (these were the days before being able to do an image search on the WWW, or capture a still frame off of a DVD, and I couldn't exactly bring our huge ancient furniture-style TV and a VCR into the computer lab — books or magazines with appropriate stills, had I had any available, would have been my only option, though I still would have been drawing this pose from scratch, since in the film the alien rises up behind her as she faces forward towards the camera). Of course, Aliens was my favorite movie at that point, and I had seen it dozens of times. The picture is, um... uncolorful because the Mac Plus was a black-and-white (not even greyscale) machine.