From the MIST1116 artpack collection we have this piece of found art by Steev Hise, an abstract composition rescued from airport security entitled “Tucson: still life with cashews and castor.” Granted, though this image is not the product of intentional human design, it did require the eye of an artist to realise the artistic merit of the image and act to capture it.
Today on Mistigram, reNM8R continued his celebratory victory lap of his rediscovery of the artscene with this hirez piece from MIST1116, an exploration of duality – fire vs ice, good vs evil – as exemplified by two angel babes splitting a Mistigris logo cleanly in half. He’s some two decades removed from the artscene, but clearly it still pulses boldly in his veins!
And today on Mistigram, in the recent MIST1116 artpack the incredible Starstew gifted us with “Threecoil”, a piece of very contemporary high resolution artwork devised so as to appear to be the ingenius output of some primordial plotter hooked up to a monochrome terminal circa 1978.
From the recent MIST1116 artpack comes this piece of high resolution visual artwork by Jamie Stantonian, juxtaposing a classic nude photograph with biometric analysis the likes of which Facebook, the Xbox 360 Kinect and the CIA run on user-contributed content and surveillance footage to determine just who you are, which ads to serve you, and where you’re going.
Today on Mistigram we share this image from MIST1116, Pinguino’s cover artwork to this year’s ToonCon program guide. The movie Hackers may have celebrated its 20th anniversary, but it is more on fleek than ever!
A day after his first appearance in an artpack, our still-fresh MIST1116, we look to the work of Cuban artist Yaimel López to try to find some understanding in today’s death of Fidel Castro. The powerful ideological symbolism in this piece, entitled “The Man”, is potent stuff, even if the nuances of just what it all means are still left up to personal interpretation. One thing for sure: nothing is as it seems, but toward what end? Well, I suppose that’s an eternal constant of life. So much for deeper meaning!
Today on Mistigram, a piece of hirez (high resolution graphics) trapped for years in the belly of the shipwrecked M-9808 artpack (finally released to the public in 2015) drawn by Knightmare, depicting some green cartoon character (my guess is The Mask) performing some incomprehensible gesture with his hand with the assistance of some props. It’s not bad – I just don’t understand it.
Today on Mistigram, a curious experiment from the desk of Grim Reaper, the longstanding VGA department coordinator of Mist Classic. The one major idea in play here is wondering what a hirez (high resolution) artist could do with the circumscribed canvas permitted a textmode artist in the space alloted for use in a FILE_ID.DIZ file, the brief description of an archive’s contents that would display on BBS file bases. I guess he got stuck thinking on iconic logos beginning with the letter “M”, so we got a peculiar association with a brand we likely would never have endorsed or given free advertising to.
Tempo probably didn’t intend to kill Mistigris for fifteen years and change when he gifted this piece of website art to us, but nonetheless that was the effect of his generous gesture. Thinking we could kill two birds with one stone by innovating the artpack-as-website, we invested our energies heavily in exploring the untravelled territory at great length (in M-9808, finally released in 2015) and the only thing we ended up killing was ourselves. Hardly seems worth it, to look at it, but at the time it seemed a promising sign that we were on the right track. Signs: don’t read too much into them.
This seems to be the only appearance Bryce made in our back catalogue, but at least he packed in enough glitz and sparkle to make up for a whole career with us! (One question: how come the background gradient isn’t in effect inside the hole of the “g”? Is it a gateway to a similar, but slightly different, dimension? Only Bryce knows for certain, and he’s not talking!)
Today on Mistigram we featured an extraordinary ASCII art / hirez hybrid by Dead Soul that first ran in our January 1998 artpack. I’m not sure precisely what relationship there is, if any, between the foreground graffiti logos and the manga-style ASCII art in the background, but they are most definitely juxtaposed.
Nominally we’re still prioritizing pieces containing Mistigris iconography… represented here by a single letter “M”. Good enough! There weren’t too many other artscene groups beginning with “M” we could be confused with…
With … quite a bit less of a story behind it, the following day’s Mistigram piece was this mad scientist hirez by Grinch, originally released in August 1997 and intended to be thrown up here following Happyfish’s ANSI art test tube before… life intervened.
“It surrounds you… it consumes you…” Today on Mistigram, we have this vga hirez Mistigris promo purportedly drawn by our longtime VGA hirez (high resolution visual artwork) department head Grim Reaper. As he was sometime after the fact (hello, Google Image Search!) busted for plagiarising quite a great deal, it’s impossible to know for sure that it’s by him – but the rule of thumb is that this drawing probably wouldn’t have been rated awesome enough to be worth the risk of stealing, and so it probably is the genuine article. It’s… not bad, all things considered! The ‘90s were the era of Rob Liefeld anatomy, so this plucky dragon is in good company.
We don’t want MIST1016 to overstay its welcome what with all of its Hallowe'eny contents, but at the same time… it’s the only thing holding back Christmas at this point, so we must persevere and press on. This morning we kick off celebrating this piece by the recently-rediscovered reNM8r which, let’s be fair, we can’t really get away with sharing at virtually any other time of year. A sublime exercise in lighting, I can’t really describe the effects of black magic being depicted here, but they resonate as intense and awesome. I would not mess with that witch and I strongly advise you do not either.
While the version of the art included in our recent MIST1016 artpack was a static image, we all agreed that this was an optimal presentation for Ed “Starstew” Statsny’s Pixkeletal … somewhat akin to how it might be cranked out of a tractor feed dot matrix printer. I remembered how “back in the day” the old graphics viewing program CSHOW would present images that way, after performing some very processor-intensive calculations, no doubt! But CSHOW is unhappy performing in DOSBox today, and I had to go through a lot of MS-DOS graphics applications before I found one that could deliver the effect – that of underpowered limping – that I was searching for. Art isn’t always supposed to be easy! Even computer art. (ESPECIALLY computer art!)
While there’s still a pumpkin on your porch and some candy wrappers blowing around in your wastebasket, here’s another sweet piece of Hallowe'eny computer art from MIST1016 – a pack of Pokemon going trick-or-treating, drawn by artscene stalwart Pinguino! The trick is that every trick-or-treater is the juvenile form, dressed as the adult form: Psyduck is dressed as Golduck, Charmander masquerading as Charizard, Shellder incognito as Cloyster, and Gastly anticipating becoming Haunter. Before we got our hands on it, a print of this was exhibited as part of the Meltdown Comics Spooky Art Show in Hollywood, hanging there for most of last month!
Prints of the design (and shirts bearing the image) are available for sale; we’ll be serving you up a menu of goods for sale by Mistigris artists when holiday season is a bit closer upon us. But for now – it’s still Hallowe'en, at least for one more day!
(Have you tried blowing in the slot?)
