Let’s Start Drawing

There’s nothing quite like getting your first graphics application running. There’s a real sense of achievement when you see your ideas for the rearrangements of pixels come together on the screen. My first coding language was BASIC on an Amstrad CPC664 and even though the code was quite laborious, I liked nothing better than to draw shapes and change the colors on the screen.

Computer-drawn images ultimately end up as single pixels (such as the ones drawn in the previous section) with differing colors on a graphics display. To draw all objects pixel by pixel whenever you’d like to create an image would be a long, drawn-out process. It might have been how images were rendered on a screen in the 1950s, but now, with advanced technology, Cartesian coordinate systems, and mathematics, we are able to specify drawing primitives and use these over and over to compose a picture.

In this chapter, you will learn about the most primitive...