Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene
marincomics.com
marincomics.com
Vallejo was definitely a popular source and influence. But demoscene graphics were really more of a technical competition than expressive art. The participants were teenagers — it was pretty obvious that most 16-year-old boys don't paint like Frazetta while also having mastered the skills for rendering those visions in 32 colors.
There was great appreciation for technical factors like palette tricks, elegant hand-made dithering, and how to do antialiasing without a soft look. It was pretty easy to tell if an image was actually hand-pixeled vs. an overpainted scan. On a 320*240 image, every detail is conspicuous. You quickly develop an eye for the hand-made detail.
I took a quick look at my old hand-pixelled images to see if there's a Vallejo. I never did the straight-up fantasy pictures, but I think the large sabretooth in this drawing must be from a fantasy painting:
https://anioni.com/pauli/site1999/work/katka.html
I made this at age 16 in Deluxe Paint IIe on the PC, so it's got the full 256-color palette. The somewhat random color explosions on the sabretooth definitely show both palette excitement and Vallejo influence.
The two cats are clearly from different sources. I didn't use scans, just worked the outlines from the sources (maybe with the help of tracing paper or something). It took around 40-50 hours to hand-pixel an image like this. In the bottom-left corner I've added the date and time when it was completed, clearly relieved that it was finally finished...
This is the last hand-pixeled image I did in 1998:
https://anioni.com/pauli/site1999/work/seqjesus.html
It's a much better picture! By this time it was obvious that pixel graphics are a relic, nobody seemed to care about my antialiasing anymore, and I moved on.
There is something to be said about all these little tricks. I think your comment about scans highlights this, meaning you do loose character when the artist isn't in total control.
I suppose one could, at the time, have a more personal technical style. Not sure how to word this and not even on a good level on the topic to draw proper conclusions. I do draw (mostly concept art, I'm good with humanoids though!), but its not what I do for a living, just to help the team understanding ideas for levels and such. I'm a programmer first and foremost.
And shoutout to the demosceners here - mode13h for the win!
I've the joy of being married to a fantasy illustrator, and through her I've been able to attend a number of fantasy art conventions and shows. As I've seen a number of comments as well as the article asking about such, I can say Boris is doing quite well! He's a regular fixture at Illuxcon (https://imaginativerealism.com/), a fantasy/sci-fi art show in Reading, PA. (Along with Julie Bell)
He's a genuinely likable and modest guy. I remember a panel he was on some years ago where the discussion was how to break into the illustration market as a new artist. And more than anyone else on the panel, Boris just seemed to get it. He'll tell you about how he had to get himself established coming from Peru with nothing, and it's kept him humble all these years.
Cool guy.
Edit: Fixed country of origin, Thanks!
I've found that limitation in artistic mediums can serve as motivation and even inspiration in art. I primarily work with glitch art; the definition is finicky, and creating it without bleeding into the more generic genre of New Aesthetic can be difficult because of how volatile and uncooperative glitches are. A hard limitation on a number of colors in a palette seems simultaneously incredibly frustrating and liberatingly-simple. While it doesn't inherently affect the medium of the work (pixel art), it poses limitations that challenge it (fidelity in detail being most notable). These limitations also pose some ceiling on the work that can be done - a limited color depth makes an artists focus much more on effective detail than perfect detail, which I think adds character to an art piece.
Very interesting article.
There's a great 1969 interview with Charles Eames in which he discusses design, and constraints as being a necessary component of design.
Some Excerpts:
Interviewer: Does the creation of Design admit constraint?
Eames: Design depends largely on constraints.
Interviewer: What constraints?
Eames: The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem: the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible, his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. The constraints of price, size, strength, balance, time and so forth. Each problem has its own peculiar list.
Interviewer: Does Design obey laws?
Eames: Aren’t constraints enough?
Also known as: The quality of software is inversely proportional to the power of hardware.
If you want a glitch to ground out a sync pulse that travels between chips in a Speak N Spell, but do so _without_ overstressing the chips and eventually destroying them, there are absolutely ways to do that. Buffers and diodes are not rocket science, and once the signals have been found, manipulating them can be made repeatable, safe, and durable.
If you want a glitch to happen somewhere between the 4th and 40th scanline of a video frame and always during the horizontal blanking interval, it's absolutely possible to construct a trigger circuit that will do precisely that, every time, perhaps still with a configurable degree of randomness but never in a way that will smoke the chips.
Which is to say, suffer for your art only if the suffering is the point. Which I suspect may actually be the case.
"I miss when people would just post gamedev resources on the internet without thinking about algorithms or engagement. In order to try to mitigate that, I decided to host my own link aggregator website!" - Pedro Medeiros
This post has been an excellent waste of time and a great source of inspiration. Thanks.
But he was painfully detailed, and probably pretty reliable, so he got a lot of work.
My fave for the human form, was Frank Frazetta[1]. He actually had a fairly classical bent to his work, and was probably an inspiration for Vallejo.
Vallejo's people are perfect and beautiful, but always look like they are posing. Frazetta's people are constantly in motion.
Old mulletheads will probably remember the cover of the first Molly Hatchet album[2].
I also enjoyed Stephen Hickman[3].
But probably, my absolute best inspiration was Roger Dean[4]. His figures weren't always that great, but his imagination was amazing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrell_K._Sweet
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Frazetta
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Hatchet_(album)#/media/F...
For a modern (born late 70s) counterpart with deeply classical influences, consider adding Roberto Ferri to your study sources:
https://www.robertoferri.net/gallery/
Studies: https://www.robertoferri.net/gallery-studi/
Drawings: https://www.robertoferri.net/gallery-disegni/
Paintings: https://www.robertoferri.net/gallery-solodipinti/
How weird: I was browsing YouTube last night (with the SmartTube app) and somehow stumbled on a video that discussed this exact thing, basically making the case that Wolfenstein 3D killed the Amiga and discussing how the unique video capabilities it had which were great for 2D side-scrollers made it so difficult to make a FPS shooter work well on it, because apparently the Amiga didn't have direct framebuffer access the way PCs did with VGA mode 0x13.
Edit: I just recalled something - the Amiga recquired either a TV or increasingly rare monitors with PAL/NTSC frequencies. You couldn't just walk in to a computer shop and buy an Amiga and a VGA compatible monitor. It was a flickery and low-resolution monitor or a TV. Not exactly endearing to professionals. I mean, I loved the Amiga maybe too much, it was always the underdog, but it was increasingly also the losing underdog.
I posit though, that by the time Amiga 1200 was out, Amiga as a commercial venture was already dead in the water. The 1200 was a last ditch effort. Still loved it, of course.
Yup, pretty desperate.
"In this GDC 2016 talk, Terrible Toybox's Mark Ferrari discusses and demonstrate some of his techniques for drawing 8 bit game graphics, including his celebrated methods for use of color cycling and pallet shifting to create complex and realistic background animation effects without frame-animation
GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every weekday. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives."
http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/
http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article-Old_School_Color_C...
http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article-Q_A_with_Mark_J_Fe...
Sadly, Joe Huckaby (who implemented the web-based demo) never got around to finish the promised drawing tool. I wonder if any other pixel art programs since then have added interface support for color cycling.
Also: “The environment was small enough that you could actually think about it”
Fascinating couple. And rightly influential over fantasy art in general.
Back in the day I used Borland Resource Workshop to pixel in an image of Rafiki holding baby Simba over his head, using the Lion King VHS cover as a reference. I can totally see where a demoscene graphician, more talented than I, would do the same with a Vallejo painting.
BTW: He was a bodybuilder, and was the model for many of his paintings. His wife also featured in many.
While being obviously simpler than old school sci-fi/fantasy paperback covers, the scene arrangement and energy is spot on.
If you look at the ring on the lizard-finger, you'll see "CDM 84."
The pictures started as 8X10s, taken with a Hasselblad, but the guy that did it (for free, so I didn't complain) was a portrait photographer.
Also, many of the subtle color differences did not come through (like thalo blue vs. thalo green, in Sentinels).
Nowadays, a digital camera could do a lot better.
Demos are ultimately about impressing, also copying without being seen as copying - if you literally copy/paste other people's stuff, that makes you "lame", but if you quote/reference it, if you one-up it - if your rivals put out a demo with 200 bobs, you put out one with 240 bobs - then you look cool and people look up to you.
I don't think many people would be too concerned that Amiga musicians sampled presets of existing synths before putting those sounds to use in an original composition that fits the Amiga's hardware limits. And they would think it _amazing_ if you could cover a well-known tune with any kind of fidelity in those tight memory limits.
I don't think many people are upset if coders reverse-engineer their rivals and they all share among the many hardware tricks you can do - because there's always someone looking to go one step further and is experimenting to find yet another new trick.
And finally, graphics artists weren't exactly penalised for re-drawing a Boris Vallejo by hand - it was difficult to do, and "the scene" liked those sorts of pictures (i.e. naked chicks and fantasy art).
Effectively there was not just "this is my original art and it's on message", but also "I can copy this well-known art, because i'm technically capable enough to do it, and you're not". And like the generative AI is doing today, or the camera did to paintings... back in the 1990s, scanners and photo editing software lowered the bar so much that even talentless fools could just scan in an image, rather than have the technical skills to reproduce it by hand, taking away what was otherwise a good channel for showing you had talent and others didn't.
And nowadays there's still plenty of skill left in coercing our limited AI generation tools to produce passable pictures, yet alone great ones. (But the field is evolving so far, that the achievements that still require skill constantly evolve, and the skills required also still shift.)
A lot of old arcade and pinball machines used screen printing for the cabinet artwork. I like it better than standard CYMK printing because it can produce more saturated colors.
Anyone recommend other articles about him?
I wonder if he was influenced by Vallejo.
As to why? I think you'll find Sir Mix-a-lot has some answers for you.
(I was struck by how erotic the works in the original article were. They would nearly all be censored out of any big name AI today... Which seems kind of a pity)
There is a "Borisography" online if you want to explore his work.
You do not have to put a number on everything and determine who is "best" and why... This isn't a competition.
Everyone have different tastes. Both guys have unique style, nothing to discuss about this.
Related amusing article: https://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/09/14/reimagining-programmi...
The programming textbooks today just seem a bit too 'quirky' by having a single animal or something on the front cover that this is the extreme version of.
Picture a couple of lines later shows two completely naked women. Might be considered "indecent"
I think the line is usually drawn around explicitly sexual acts.
(I also don’t believe being indecent is necessarily a bad thing in art. It is sometimes just another effect which can be used.)
Notice that the men in the paintings of Vallejo are also almost completely naked, hacking away at monsters with large weapons. Yet you did not point to them and say they were indecent.
I really hope that the rest of the world doesn’t take over the sex/violence sensitivities as are prevalent in the US.
In my neck of the woods we are much more relaxed about nakedness, and find the scandals in the US around this topic amusing. But for instance the lengths at which for instance facebook goes to to avoid nipples and penises feels more like an overstep in cultural freedom.
It would be fine to just ignore that stupidity, but people who spend time in that hellish environment adapt to it, and actually start to believe that there is some deep meaning to the rituals they have to make, and even invent their own explanations.
So there's a country with a giant porn industry, but at the same time newspapers are full of stories about “sexual predators” hiding under every bush, and someone's naked breast is considered worthy of being turned into a “national scandal”. Intuition hints that one is intertwined with another.
When people from elsewhere hear about gender neutral bathhouse (formerly “common village/family bathhouse”, or simply “a river”), they picture themselves asking a granny how's steam in the sauna. In certain countries, they immediately think of some kind of orgy instead (based on media descriptions and fantasies). And certain people of limited wit even try to reenact them in reality, with pathetic results.
Specific social convention makes people gasp, roll their eyes, and hide the children when they see someone without clothes, not their strict moral principles. It is highly unlikely that it will disappear by itself. On the contrary, there are forces that benefit from it. The aforementioned porn industry have successfully used commoners' fears to ban non-corporate-produced wanking materials from the biggest websites. Not even nature is allowed to compete with exclusive providers of images of sexual nature to the consumers.
The article author himself realizes that the image he is copying has no narrative. Many of the images lack much in the way of composition. The bodies are nicely rendered as oiled-up perfected sex objects, but that’s about it.
This is a forum hosted by venture capitalist investors and frequented primarily by IT professionals ("hackers"), unwittingly opening some NSFW material probably won't fly well in that kind of environment.
The National Gallery (of the UK) has this page one click from the homepage, "Our most famous paintings"
Whether the standards of workplaces should allow artistic nudity is completely beside the point. Neither you, nor I, nor Dalewyn control such things. All we can do is work around them.
No. You could quit and be free.
Though some might argue it's also Not Safe For Wife too, YMMV.
Normal people, not so much.
That's what "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is diplomatically trying to say.
Frazetta's art is full of tension [1] and energy [2] whilst Vallejo is simply drawing his circle of bodybuilders in various poses. The environments he paints have absolutely no effect on his posed subjects and the end-result is disconnected and comes across as "fake" in its intended setting as it evokes memories of bodybuilding gyms.
[1] https://www.frazettagirls.com/cdn/shop/products/frazettagirl...
[2] https://frank-frazetta.pixels.com/featured/the-destroyer-fra...
I prefer Frazetta too, but Vallejo is rightly recognised as one of the greats. He does his own thing. Not everyone can, or should try to, be Frazetta. That'd be pretty boring.
Or, like I once told a friend: you gotta stop comparing everyone to Bugs (Bunny).
"Yogurt! Yogurt! I hate Yogurt! Even with Strawberries."