HITEK HD GRFX

------------------

Some reflections from this piece and the era.

I made this from memory of a folder I had on my desktop in 2004 that said HD Wallpapers. I think we still had dial up and I used to scour Yahoo for images of high resolution 2D/3D wallpapers that would make me feel like a bad ass from The Matrix movie. These kind of graphics were really popular among teens and internet crawlers as many of them were formatted to look good on flat screens, which were just becoming the norm from the big ol crt monitors. I had a G4 Mac, so the images really popped making the art even more impressive. 

I remember being pretty envious of people on newgrounds.com as there were alot of digital media artists and graphic designers on there and their sigs and avatars were so good, futuristic and clean. That was the look. Clean with splashes of texture and patterns with hard lined overlays. You could see this style too in PS2 games like from DDR of the time as well. I tried my best to make stuff like this because my dad put photoshop on my computer and the possibilities were endless! Newgrounds made me push myself both in music and graphics. There was voting, so you knew if you sucked. People gave good feedback instead of talking shit because it was a community of artists who were also once newbies. 

I surprised myself almost as a late coming of age acknowledgement when I made this piece naturally. It was as if it was obvious what to do, which would have boggled my mind as a teen. I remembered the difference between the superior graphics of the time and the more novice level high contrast style image editing that my peers liked to put on live journal, myspace, and instant messenger. We all thought it was cool and accessable. A trope of the moment.

After doing the initial 3d portion in blender, and cleaning up png's in illustrator, I got into Photoshop and mixed around probably 20 different layers and color adjustments. Funny enough my favorite part of any artwork I do is that final color adjustment, the critical step to make a piece "explode off the page".

My Instagrm https://www.instagram.com/sequencer1?r=nametag