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Fan Art: Lin Minmei from Macross
1989

I was starting to get into animation and comic books again, so I picked up a "movie book" or "mook" based on the anime Macross. This is a "fan art" piece copied from the mook by hand on my trusty old Apple IIGS's 320x200 16-color mode. I would say it was my first real experience with putting time into an image. Every pixel is hand plotted; although I had a cheap graphics tablet, I wasn't comfortable with it. Besides, for really fine work the mouse is the way to go. I spent hours tweaking the hair, learning how to get the curves implied by pixel placement to have the right quality. The result is not quite faithful to the original, but it still does a good job of representing what meticulous pixel work can do for a low-res, minimum color image. --- Because the original was done with Apple IIGS 1.2 aspect ratio pixels, it looks squashed on modern computers. I've stretched it in HTML to make the aspect correct, but this introduces distortion in the image. It's easily visible in the background diagonal lines (ugh). Save the image and bring it up to see the line quality for yourself, unstretched.