Boris Vallejo and the Pixel Art of the Demoscene

I used to be a teenage demoscene graphics artist back in the waning days of the Amiga and earliest days of Windows-based demos.

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.

I was delighted to see this name pop up in my HN feed of all places.

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 had learned to appreciate the color limitations during the old-school graphics competition at Evoke, where we could only use a predefined color palette. The first time I submitted an entry in 2022, I hated it. The second time, in 2023, I came to accept the limited color palette as a problem to solve. And by 2024, I actually started to enjoy the challenge."

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.

Falling down the rabbit hole I stumbled on this link: https://gamedev.city/

"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.

Influence of Vallejo and Julie Bell cannot be underestimated on fantasy illustration. Personally, when I studied anatomy for animation work I did back when I was still doing he was a big part of it, even though his work did incline more towards bodybuilding kind of types. Stylistically though, big influence on fantasy. Sorayama was mentioned as well. Again, personally it was: Burne Hogarth, Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, Luis Royo, Sorayama. Even they're not of same period, I group them together as major influence and study sources.

There's something touchingly innocent about Boris Vallejo's work. It is as if he is channeling the fantasies of a 13-year-old boy without shame, guilt or even self-consciousness. It is that rare artwork that is only about itself. It is like a picture that is run through iterative image generation using only the words "hotter" and "heroic" and "mysterious" over and over until an asymptote is reached. It seems pure and innocence in its singular interest, its lack of subtext, if not in its sexual content.

It sincerely pleases me to see the Amiga so rightfully discussed in this article. In the 1980s, Amiga was a magical computer years ahead of so many of its peers (including the PC by miles). Sadly, the video capabilities that made it so special eventually became its Achilles heel.

You might enjoy an entire talk on using a limited color palette for graphics in early games and how it stimulated creativity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

"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."

Boris and Julie are husband and wife, and both were bodybuilders, which gave them plenty of ideas for their paintings of male and female warriors with heroic physiques.

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.

I met him, back in the 1980s, when I was still doing paintings, myself[0]. I was surprised at how short he was.

BTW: He was a bodybuilder, and was the model for many of his paintings. His wife also featured in many.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886

The article links to the "no copy?" site: http://www.kameli.net/nocopy/ which was highly influential in its own time...

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.

The high resolution but limited colors example looks like screen printing. Screen printing involves squeezing ink through stencils supported by a fine mesh. It can produce excellent detail, but you need a separate stencil for each color so the number of colors is usually low.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_printing

How did his art become the face of 80s fantasy? of GoldenAxe? of D&D?

Anyone recommend other articles about him?

Boris Vallejo vs. Frank Frazetta

https://www.sequentialartistsworkshop.org/blog/2015/09/3388

Really interesting article. Interesting to know how one artist's vision can ripple through different artistic mediums

I don't think Vallejo's art was necessarily limited to the demoscene; in the late 70s/80s that style was very common on video game cover art.

Related amusing article: https://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/09/14/reimagining-programmi...

I loved this artist as a kid, Frank Frazetta too.

> "featuring idealistically rendered warriors and princesses, muscular and scantily clad (but not indecent)"

Picture a couple of lines later shows two completely naked women. Might be considered "indecent"

Fair warning that some of the art is NSFW.

For a more modern approach, try using "I Can't Believe It's Not Photography" with a prompt including "in the style of Boris Vallejo".