VU 3D - Ode to a Wine Glass
Dear reader, do you know what one of my favourite things to see on the ZX Spectrum was? (No, not a Mr Kipling Apple Pie heating gently as you played your way through The Hobbit!) But a blank screen on one of my favourite art packages VU-3D, it was an invitation to create, to play with shapes , to completely lose myself for an afternoon. In 1982 Psion Software brought us VU-3D , it wasn't a game, it wasn't really for education purposes, but I became hooked.
I had previously used 'Draw' which came on the 'Horizons ' cassette. That was okay for general shapes and allowed you to colour in , with that familiar Spectrum colour bleed giving your artwork a decidedly psychedelic feel. But this was a different beast, this allowed images nice and close to one another, this allowed you to go back and resize the image and this allowed 3D effect shading. Plus with the Next Z function you were drawing in 3D , building up cross sections of your figure. Remember this is 1982 .....to say I was gobsmacked was probably an understatement. I had no real idea of what I was doing , but sometimes that is the utter joy of using a piece of software like this.
As I've said before I loved (still do) playing with colours and fiddling around with artwork, I could never draw free hand , which is why at school I steered towards technical drawing . All straight lines and parallel motion bars. You can kind of see why I loved this program . Initially I would draw boxes and triangles and play around with the shading options , seeing if I could make them look 3D (in the same way I would draw endless rectangles and rows of houses on paper.) But then...
I discovered the wine glass and sugar cube ( as I called it) and the fact that you could edit this. The amount of time that I spent playing with this image as a 12 year old possibly is longer than the amount of time I played JetPac and Chequered Flag put together. It was like entering a hidden world , it was like being Dr Who playing in between the dimensions ,( at least that's how it felt to me ). This went far beyond colouring in , or using a Spirograph , or using a set of stencils, this bordered on magic!
As I used the Next Z command to edit the cross sections of this graphic things started to get a little surreal , I could melt the glass, I could warp the glass. But my destructive efforts could only be seen once I had finished and asked it to display. This was better than some of the computer games (yes, I WAS a strange child) . There was something strangely satisfying in this, I could lose whole afternoons to just playing around with these figures. Once I had learned how those figures were put together I began to experiment with my own figures , a very enjoyable learning experience had happened , perhaps this software was educational after all.
I still love this program, to write this blog I do go back and re-play these pieces of software. This blog would have been written a lot quicker had I not been back and played with this. But then , I probably would not have been sat here smiling like this either had I not been back to re-visit this.
Playing games can relieve stress but so can art, and art is in the eye of the beholder and creator. When you draw , paint, sculpt , photograph (or whatever is your medium ) there is no magic formulae , no set series of moves, if YOU think it looks good, it looks good . That is what is so relaxing about playing about with art (or should be , this is from inside Julie's head , please note - other realities may differ!)
As a pupil my artwork was never good enough for exhibitions , my report cards in art stayed at a steady C grade- must try harder, but that was on paper, a new era was dawning.
Give me a ZX Spectrum and a digital wine glass
Playing games can relieve stress but so can art, and art is in the eye of the beholder and creator. When you draw , paint, sculpt , photograph (or whatever is your medium ) there is no magic formulae , no set series of moves, if YOU think it looks good, it looks good . That is what is so relaxing about playing about with art (or should be , this is from inside Julie's head , please note - other realities may differ!)
As a pupil my artwork was never good enough for exhibitions , my report cards in art stayed at a steady C grade- must try harder, but that was on paper, a new era was dawning.
Give me a ZX Spectrum and a digital wine glass