Same as the Fokker, but it's a SPAD! It was the latest in technology for 1916. A very tough, powerful plane, it was one of the fastest vehicles ever built at the time.

It also flies like a city bus... straight. Quickly, however, people realized that speed is far more important than agility not just for reconnaissance, but also in combat situations.

amiga

The newer and vastly improved Spad 13. Two machine guns went a long way towards improving this patrol scout's hunting prowess.

amiga

It was quite underpowered and incapable of zooming, but it was easy to fly, and had outstanding handling characteristics at high altitude.

amiga

The plane that started the Triplane craze in 1917. In the game Red Baron II, this plane really sucks (spins too much). Like the DrI, the Sopwith Triplane was slow, but it was nevertheless effective for dogfights in specialty squadrons.

amiga

The infamous Camel, or as one pilot put it, “those little popping firecrackers!” It was very difficult to fly as the engine was very powerful and the torque of the propeller would cause the plane to dip or rise sharply when turning right or left, respecively. The torque was so bad, in fact, that pilots noted that the plane could make left turns faster by turning right, instead! Nonetheless, if was an awesome aircraft in skilled hands, and also has the highest kill count of any WWI aircraft — arguably for pilots as well as opponents.

amiga

This is my earliest surviving attempt at realistic drawing — on scratchboard, no less. Among my rare attempts at realistic art, I think I have an earlier pen drawing of a barn, but I can't find it.

weasel

Most of my Backing Out artwork is on the BO website, but this one is pretty special, as it's the first drawing I know of that is traditionally colored (unless I missed something obvious).

Christopher, having been inspired by the Crocodile Dundee movie, always wore a vest and bush hat in the early days of his development. I'm sure most Australians appreciate that this is no longer the case. ;)

Thankfully, my characters also no longer walk on their hocks, though they are usually still barefoot.

chris dingo stacy cocker spaniel

Ah, ye olde pixele arte! Some random screen I did while I was part of an Amiga users group.

amiga

Whoa-eee-ohh... Tale Spin!

amiga tale spin fanart

A rather unusual experiment turned into one of my best digital renderings on the Amiga 1000.

Yay, signed and dated!

amiga

Well, here is is, the very first furry picture I've ever drawn on the computer.

The low resolution of the Amiga made it easy to draw without making things look accidentally distorted, so I quickly started drawing a lot of stuff digitally instead of on paper. Most of those images are pretty lousy (boring, incomplete, or just way too stupid), but they do have the noteworthy honor of having survived the shredder (see the crap gallery about that). Unshredded or not, it's not like I have a reason to repost my other digital pr0ns. Boy, they sure were awful!

I'm still not sure about the date. I know for sure this was drawn on my Amiga 1000, but the datestamp on my master disc says September 2nd, 1992, and I know that's wrong because by then I had upgraded to an A1200. Also, a LOT of my images from this time all say September 2nd, but the times are all weird. My master disk also has a creation date of 1994 but the files say 1992, and my backup disks all have datestamps that say “1970”. It always amuses me how a computer built in the mid-80's would report a current time of 1970 (the so-called “UNIX epoch”) if it didn't have the optional battery clock. I guess this could be considered the Y70's Bug. :)

My best guess is that I drew this between 1990 and 1991, before I got the clock upgrade for my A1000, and the datestamp was reset in 1992 when I got my A1200, when everthing was copied to my then-new 80MB hard drive. Almost all the early digital furry art in my crap gallery was also drawn around this time. Forgive any inconsistencies in the dates. It's a war between datestamps and my memory, and datestamps are unreliable when it comes to file backups and comptuers so old that you had to add battery clocks as accessories.

Anyway, this image is not at all fapworthy, so I figured you'd rather hear about old computer hardware, instead. Mmmmm... Amiga 1000... *FAP* *FAP* *FAP*

amiga

Well, here is is, the very first furry picture I've ever drawn. Yes, this really is it! I'm a bit confused about the timeline for my earliest stuff, but this is definitely the image that started it all. I drew very little of Chris at that time. The real volume, and my signature style of squished eyes and peachfuzz cheeks, developed in 1991.

By the age of nine, I had already built a lackluster stack of comics featuring blobs and silly, borderless faces. I was not, shall you say, a natural artist, and did not start drawing “as soon as I could hold a pencil” as many other artists say.

That all changed when my parents took me to my aunt's wedding (and Disney World) in Orlando, Florida. While camping out in my aunt's home (with a horrible sunburn), I saw something that changed my life — a Sunday newspaper with a full-page Pogo comic strip on it. I was instantly hooked on anthropomorphic characters and comic strips. That same day, this drawing of Christopher was made.

I had just seen Crocodile Dundee on VHS a little while earlier, and thus I decided to make Christopher a dingo, sporting the flat-topped hat I had seen in the film. The first “real” Backing Out art and strips started showing up in 1991 with the full cast of kids, including Joshua, Rebecca, Robert, and Vicky. Things kicked into high gear in early '93, though I spent a lot of time coming up with ideas and not so much time drawing (thankfully, I put dates on all of my comics). The Kanus parents, Darryl and Nokino, did not show up until much later — around 1995.

It took about six years for me to ditch that damned hat, too. ;)

chris dingo