Ready...Set...DRAW
Some of my best childhood memories , it has to be said centre around a pack of felt tip pens or wax crayons and a colouring book. Or better still coloured ball point pens and a Spirograph. So what could my little black box buddy offer me to wean me away from these? I doubt it could make anything as tasty as a felt tip pen lid ( please say I wasn't the only child who would chew these to death at a rate of one a day?)
On the 'Horizon' introductory cassette was a program called quite simply 'Draw' , it was hidden away on the B side of the cassette, blink and you would miss it. It allowed you to draw shapes and colour them in. Hmmm....You can see why I became hooked. No dried out felt tip pens here, or melted wax crayons. Not even a pencil sharpener in sight. Simple movement of two crosses around a screen and then C for circle, B for box and L for line. The option to paint in any of the 8 spectrum colours and I could be kept amused for hours.
I call the above 'Pacman has his eyes sucked off by a hairdryer' , what it actually is , is an attempt to draw a circle within a circle and a box over a smaller circle. As you can see the ZX Spectrum did have a few problems with this and indeed in some of the games this colour bleed is what makes the games a unique Spectrum experience. In this program they became a unique feature, making your artwork more surreal and more abstract. You could actually do some really cool effects with this function. There is something so relaxing about just doodling and colouring things in. To be able to do this on a TV screen, all from this funny little black box was mind blowing for an 11 year old in 1983. The fact that it used no paper and no ink and you weren't going to run out of pages was unbelievable.
However , at the time I was unable to save any of my insane doodlings, or to print them . How many masterpieces were lost to the sands of time ? ( Well, none, look at the above effort , which I call 'Big White Splodge on the Sun') . But then how many of my drawings , Spirographs , pieces of colouring in did I save anyway, virtually none. It was an excellent program to chill out, to explore the world of colour , it was never designed to enable anyone to paint a masterpiece . It was designed to show the potential of this wonderful little black box in it's infancy. But for many years I would come back to this program time and again to play with the circles and make splodges , it gave me head-space, thinking space. Nowadays the colouring in I do is all on paper (still to gain calmness and thinking space) . Yet still this program has a special place in my heart , for being there in the beginning .