For Christmas 2021 we created some original artwork right on the Sega Mega Drive.
Art Alive is an art programme for the Sega Mega Drive. It allows you to produce original digital artwork right on your Sega Mega Drive. Unfortunately, there’s no way to save your creations, unless you take a photo of your television screen and spend a considerable amount of time sharpening colours, adding filters and cleaning up the artwork. That’s what we did to make this Merry Christmas Santa (PDF) card you can print, or this e-Card. Click in the text box to add your own message, save your PDF and send it on! What a fantastic way to spread some Christmas cheer!
Merry Christmas!
In this video I step through the design of this card and how I approached making art in Art Alive. The programme has some severe limitations but working within the tools available, we were able to design a fitting Christmas Card graphic. After designing the graphic on Art Alive, I took a high resolution photo and loaded it into Photoshop. Using a combination of Posterize, Sharpness and the Oil Painting effect, I was able to achieve a smoother image without the obvious TV scan lines. I then brought the graphic into InDesign where I designed the actual card.
The printable card is simple, you can write your own message, and is mostly white (I recommend printing on coloured paper). The e-Card is based on an A4 design, so you can print it if you want, but uses an editable text box for the message. All you need to do is open it in your PDF reader, click the white box to add your text, save it and send it on.
I already had an idea of how I wanted this card to look when I started the video. I wanted it to feature a large face with something sticking up its nose. Originally I tended to draw a Christmas Pudding with candles on top. Those candles were going to slide up inside the nose. The concept changed to candy canes which are easier to clearly draw in such a low-resolution application. Being able to clearly depict the elements was a constant challenge, as I drew the face there were plenty of areas I had to redraw to make the picture clear and easier to look at.
I’m really pleased with the end result. It looks silly, but it also took some careful consideration to make it right. I hope you enjoyed the process, and sharing this card as much as I did making it. You can find more of our art over in the Leftover Culture Review store. Merry Christmas.