About Archie Chipps

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Date: 05/08/2021

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At the beginning of digital art, not all the way back to first.

Date: 05/8/2021

My first computer was in 1994, 2 years before that I had a Super Nintendo with Mario Paint. I took out a loan for $1500 to buy a second grade computer. The first rate was twice as much without twice the computer. I also bought the first inkjet the OkiData 2010, and a flatbed scanner, it took 3 passes. Because I was going to use the computer for art, a good video card was added and the drivers to get 16 million colors. The system was an IBM compatable, a 80486 with turbo, and Photoshop 2.5 LE. in Windows 3.1 with Dos 6.2. I bought a program to see file thumbnails called Compupic and it had a version that let me see pictures in Dos. I started out doing Photorepair, and in a year Windows 95 was out and to upgrade I would need to pay full price for Photoshop 3, but I kept Photoshop 2.5 running until 2005. Unlike other computers at the time I didn't need to see more colors with a 16 bit program. I installed a driver to view the 16 bit images. Windows and Photoshop was both 16 bit. I worked to rebuild my computer with moving it to a larger case, and adding more drives. The drives on other computer needed to be on the list, and when they grew too old to use newer drives, they were taken to the dump. My computer had a main board that came from China, with a lot of added featured other computers didn't have like using a mouse in the bios and programming each drive with the information on the drive, like number of sectors, section sizes, and any drive could be programed. after the newer computer came out I build more computers and they became easier with auto detect instead of programming everything. This first computer had a bad drive it it, because my brother used it in his computer while it was shorting out hard drives. A newer drive would be more that 10 gigabytes and it was taking a long time to defrag the drives because it was not made to run huge files. So I ended the new update for a larger drive, because I knew some day when the battery dies it will lose the internal memory, and computers built after that used a chip for the information like a drive. One short at any time would kill that old type computer, so it was time to retire. I restored a lot of photographs and was getting into redrawing them completely to create a better quality image. I was asked to use a newspaper clipping of a guy to print an 8x10 picture. Because nobody else could do it I used the features I could see and my imagination to imagine more details, because all I had was abount 6 dots for the face. I was made the top photorepair artist in a time when people wanted to believe is was state of the art computers doing all the work, not an artist version. They wanted to believe the image was restored by a computer, and you just stick a photograph in one end and the new and improved version comes out on the other end. Because the quality of my art was better than the photographs I was restoring, everyone beleaved it to be an actual photograph, not art. Some knew what goes into repairing or recreating a photograph and would pay for the artist time, while everyone else didn't want to pay more than $50. Some took days and some almost a week of work, which is pretty good to recreate a photograph, with water stains, missing sections, sun burned faded images, double exposure, and just too much dirt on a bad copy of the original image, faded to hide cracks, and filled in missing areas with a black marker. Then there was the wallet sized image that was very blurry when it was, enlarged, and all the defects were enlarged with it. I finally stopped doing Photorepair because I wasn't making enough for all the work. In 1999 I started making media player skins, or you can call them themes. My art had a few people downloading it, so I competed with the best to become just as good, because I could see how many downloads each one had. I saw some art that looked like a kid made, that was one of the top downloads. I worked hard for 5 months to have the same quality of art, but there was a lot of people waiting on the next work the top artist made, and didn't notice I was just as good. I looked at the bad art, and people liked them because it was a way of seeing things that nobody else thought about. So I made my own. The Yen and Yang and I made it open up to show a video screen inside. The top artist had 15,000 downloads was their most, and in 3 days my new art hit 300,000 and reached 600,000 by the end of the week and stopped, like it broke the counter. Jessica Simpson made a Video after seeing my art, and used it in her music video. The had a guy call me and ask how much do I want to let her use the Yen and Yang in her video, and anything I said was no, can do it and she was busy. While she was telling him what to say. I just said we are not reaching an agreement, so I guess she can't use it. A month later she showed her music video on AOL videos. I could not call her or do anything, because I didn't want to be known as an artist that sewed another artist. I just wanted some credit, and that was one of the things she said no to, because they already made the video. I still make art, but after I lost 8 years of art I was remaking new art, that was lost as fast as I could make it, and I just thought about why I make art. The answer is to get better. Each time I remade the art I just lost, it improved. I could see the experience was part of my improvement, and after that, it didn't matter if I saved any of my art. Everything I have now was created after a friend in another state sent me a book drive, and I started saving my art again. I saw I became the artist I wanted to be when I didn't have art to look back on for an excuse to do my best. I thought I was better, but by doing my best, I saw it made me the artist I wanted to be. I was not very interested in making art, and the process seemed to take too long, but I was making huge images, while I only liked painting something quick and simple, not spend a month and hate looking at it everyday. So, I worked on programming more, and became a better programmer and earned an IT degree in a 2 year college. The teacher said some people understand programming and it is a part of then. They said I was a person that would never have problems with programming because I have the mind for it. The finals for a programming class was to make a connect 4 game, or create 50 parent 3D characters, and 45 child characters. I made the connect 4 game, and it did take all that programming to show every possible position to win, and run checkes to stop when there is a winner. In a php class we had to make a website for the sales person to use at checkout. I created a store the sales person controls, with all the features they wanted, but while everyone was displaying tables of text, I created images, a shiopping cart, user login, adding flowers, and deleteing flowers that would remove the same flowers use in other flower arrangements. I didn't have a list of flowers in the list with checkboxes. I had quantity in the boxes for how many flowers was used, and the numbers calculated the cost and adds materials and pay to make it. Then when a red rose is missing the red rose arrangement had nothing in it and didn't cost anything. While the flowers and arrangement totalled up and added tax, then sent to print up a receipt. It was not required to add the sales to the database, and issue an order number, but I added that later to finish it. I earned an A in the program, and rarely asked for help from the teacher. I am sure my flower shop was the best, and required more creative thinking to make it work. I have a copy on this website, while the information still needs filled in to make it work. I still need to add information in the database like tax information. The programming was made after I made the information first, and to make it work I need to add it. I just redid this whole website, so I am not in a hurry to get the old college project running again.