Picture Pages, Picture Pages, Now It's Time For Picture Pages...

I was going through some old files today in an effort to avoid doing anything constructive with my time, and I stumbled across a couple of old pictures that I thought I'd share with you all.
I did not find any of the old pictures that I would actually like to find, as I apparently never managed to save copies of them onto any of my old floppies or Zip disks, and therefore never transferred them to CD.
At least one of the pictures I would like to have is on one (or both) of the old hard drives I tried recovering data from when I got my external enclosure kit, but alas, my efforts were in vain.
In any case, here are a couple that I did find.
First up is an old drawing I did, oh, I'd say about ten years ago:



Compared to some of my current work, it's extremely crude.
Bear in mind, however, that the basic image was drawn on a 33 MHz 486 with 4 MB of RAM (Note: I corrected the processor speed. I had originally put 25 MHz, but I remembered later that it was 33.) running Windows 95, and my only input device was a mouse. It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools, but between the computer and the crude image editing software I had, along with the tendency of the mouse rollers to get gummed up, there were definite limits on what I could accomplish.
A couple of years later, on a slightly better computer (a 166 MHz Pentium Classic with 16 MB of RAM, but the same mouse), with better software I tweaked it a little. For example, I added the lens flare.

This picture is even older, drawn on the aforementioned 486 when it was still running Windows 3.1. I'd say this was late 1994, early 1995, and I was just beginning to play around with drawing on the computer. It's not in color because the program I was using only offered a palette of 256 shades of gray.



This one is truly "old school," as it was actually drawn on real paper using a real pencil. It's hard to remember a time when I didn't draw on the computer, though here's the evidence to prove that there was such a time.



This is a picture that began its life as a paper and pencil drawing, but was then scanned in and painted on the computer. I suppose it's actually sort of odd that I don't do things this way very often. From sketch to finished picture, pretty much everything is done on the computer. At this point I don't think I even own a proper sketchbook.



And moving away from drawings, here we see Jon, circa October 1997. The location is somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere, MN, in the parking lot of a church shortly before my friend Eric's wedding. It may not show, but in the picture I am operating on about three hours of sleep that followed a night of consuming massive amounts of Guinness and giving all of the money I had, along with my immortal soul (which, years later, I actually got her to give back), to a stripper.


Anyway, just thought I'd share these little glimpses into the past with you. If I find anything else of interest I'm sure I'll post it here...