Nowadays we take digital art for granted. graphics tablets, iPads, styluses, millions of colours, gigabytes of memory, terabytes of storage, powerful art programs...
In 1991, though, it was not so easy. I had to make do with a 12MHz 80286 computer with 1MB of memory, a 20MB hard drive, a 13" CRT VGA monitor that could display sixteen colours at 640X480 resolution with a dot pitch of 0.39mm and a refresh rate of 60hz (interlaced!), and I had to use an old school mouse with a ball instead of a laser.
This is the first Sam the Shark cartoon that I drew on a computer back then. I used to pump these out weekly for publication in the school paper. It's funny to look back at those old 8-bit files that I still have: Back then file names were limited to 8 characters plus a 3 character extension. This comic was called "Snooze Blues", which was too long for DOS, so the file name was snuzbluz.pcx (pcx is an obsolete image format).
Truthfully, drawing on paper was easier, but computers were the future, dammit! Here's an old paper Sam comic:
I used to do a lot of pencil/graphite drawings, such as this deer:
And stupid me decided that I needed to try to draw that deer on the computer, too.
I am not proud of this. I can't believe I even still have the file. I don't know why the date on the computer deer is older than the pencil deer, because I know I drew the pencil one first, but it doesn't matter. This is frickin' TERRIBLE.
Not all of my computer drawings were so terrible though. I am still proud of this one, especially given the limited resources I had. I drew this pixel by pixel, meaning that I zoomed in and placed every pixel where I wanted it in order to get more than 16 colours out of the old VGA 16 colour limitation (the CB monogram was added years later). It took me two weeks to finish it.
This, by the way, was the album cover for Judas Priest's Screaming for Vengeance. I had earlier tried to draw it by hand with a pencil and was unhappy with how it came out, so to punish myself I redid it on the computer. I was a weird teenager. Here's the actual album cover: