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:
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:
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.
Wow I remember the floating baby head! Yah this was the waning days for sure.. I think I'm a few years ahead of you. The demo scene back then was something else, sneakernet and illicit basement bazaars...
I wasnt alive when you did this but those are incredible!
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.
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.
Ha, Boris is my neighbor. I used to see him and Julie walking their dog frequently, but it's mostly Julie now. I knew that they were painters, but I didn't appreciate who they were until recently and it's better that way. We say "Hi" to each other as we pass and go do our own thing.
"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.
> I've found that limitation in artistic mediums can serve as motivation and even inspiration in art.
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.
If that's glitch art the way I understand glitch art, then it's only volatile and uncooperative because its practitioners want it to be. The majority of people I've seen glitching circuits have no understanding of what they're doing, actively resist gaining any, and then act frustrated when the humidity changes and the glitch doesn't work anymore, or the chip dies after a few more tries.
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.
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.
But not Darrel K. Sweet[0] (one of the more published artists). His people looked like bobbleheads. He wasn't really so good at getting the human form right.
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.
I had forgotten about Sweet — yeah he was everywhere with his awkward looking artwork. I kind of loathe his color palette. (I loathe Vallejo's as well though.)
"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."
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.
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.
13-year-old me fantasised about working with big deterministic boxes; these days the boxes are much smaller and a little less deterministic, but I'd hope I'm still channeling that fantasy without shame, guilt or even self-consciousness.
Never even occurred to me that this art style would be something an adult should be ashamed of, but makes complete sense now that I thought about it. Reminds me of recent space marines 2 drama.
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.
>Sadly, the video capabilities that made it so special eventually became its Achilles heel.
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.
It certainly has direct framebuffer access. But the bitplane representation where the bits of each pixel's value are spread out across multiple bytes can make certain kinds of updates very time consuming.
It didn't exactly kill it. Wolfenstein being feasible on the PC and not the Amiga, was just a symptom of stagnation. The Amiga (as a promising commercial venture!) had doom (pun intended) written all over it even before Wolfenstein. Commodore ignored the Amiga for years and years.
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.
A1200 and A4000 could be hooked into a VGA monitor for the flickerless experience. The caveat was that the flicker-free display modes were added on top of old ones, which meant that, while you could run Workbench and most applications on the VGA monitor, all games ran in the obsolete PAL modes your VGA display couldn’t handle. This created a market for niche dual-mode displays, which solved the problem, but were a bit pricey.
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.
I remember that there was some sort of shareware with a 40 day trial that my brother ran, but it stayed at 40 days. They had removed the clock as a cost saving measure on the A1200.
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.
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.
Yes. Of course, there's plenty of skill to be developed in photographing, too.
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.)
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.
The origin of the whole style seems to have been Frank Frazetta doing illustrations for pulp serials of Conan and John Carter of Mars, then book covers for Conan, then Gygax reads a whole load of pulp novels including Conan and builds a game system to play the adventures of those novels. Vallejo also did Conan art, and it seems his first book cover was for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Barbarian
There is a "Borisography" online if you want to explore his work.
I was born in the mid 80s so I don't get this reference - what do you mean?
(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)
Sigh... completely different styles, plus the guy nitpicked inferior BV images and compared them with FF's better works. BV also had several visceral and dirty fight scenes with Conan, yet the painter used some of BV's less detailed creations to prove his point.
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.
Oh hell yes, I really like the covers in that article you linked. It's just amusing to me that "A buff dude and a hot chick fighting dinosaurs on a volcano on mars" somehow is analogous to "Porting COBOL to Excel in TPS reports". The "Pair Programming" one at the end is good, because there is some sort of vague connection you could make with the image. It's like saying "by doing how to do this boring and specific thing you're KINDA JUST LIKE THE GUY ON THE COVER TOO SO YOU SHOULD TOTALLY BUY THIS BOOK". They say sex sells, but what does it sell? This is like an experiment in the most unsexy thing that sex could sell.
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.
I think Računari magazine had a couple of non-photo covers in that style, but maybe being a Galaksija spin-off gave them the connection to a F/SF artist?
This comment exemplifies the puritanical view that nakedness is somehow bad or impure.
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.
I wish we'd drop it ourselves. It's excruciating living amongst people who will pick up torches and pitchforks when anyone under 18 is remotely exposed to sexual content, but shrug and look stupid when that same cohort goes on a shooting spree.
Attributing it all to puritans is misleading and even anachronistic. A direct link would be possible at the time when the phrase “puritanism sells” made sense, but a number of generations have alreafy been born into the “sex sells” world.
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.
Modesty is a virtue shared by many cultures throughout the world. It is not exclusive to the US or Puritans. And the US is not a cultural monolith. Millions of people in the US do not hold modesty as a virtue.
It is true that modesty is not an exclusively US puritan ideal, but the US has a disproportionately strong cultural influence on other societies.
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.
Facepook is just another textbook example of bureaucracy breaking loose. Companies that give them money (for ads) declare that “content” (i. e. everything that exists in this world) can be “SFW” and “NSFW”, and they only want the former. Ergo, women don't have breasts. End of story. All the excuses and exceptions corporate human robots invent afterwards are just irrelevant icing on the cake.
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.
Is the misspelling of FB an intentional Russian joke? I haven’t heard that one before, but I can probably not unhear it the next time I hear a Russian speaker say that word.
"Modesty" is culturally defined in the first place. What you would consider "modest" today often would be extremely immodest a century ago. And, conversely, some societies don't consider nudity to be immodest in and of itself.
I know these types of images take hold in a 13-year-old boy’s mind and make him a lifelong fan, and for anyone who lived through that particular time and place, I understand the appeal. But for most everyone else, this is some cheesy artwork. I say that as someone who read more than my share of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
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.
Compare Vallejo to Frank Frazetta and it's immediately obvious why the latter is considered a master of fantastic art while the former is drifting towards obscurity.
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.
You might as well be comparing Slayer and Cannibal Corpse. Both styles have their place and they can be enjoyed in their own right.
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).
All art is cheesy. If you briefly find any of it profound it's only because in some aspect you are briefly a 13 year old boy full of awe and excitement.
That's what "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is diplomatically trying to say.
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.
This does in fact count as NSFW in every workplace I've ever been in. Perhaps stop trying to argue with the poster who was merely trying to give people a friendly warning just so they know they might get in trouble if someone sees them looking at this art at work.
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.
I can actually imagine “venture capitalist investors” participating in some oiled spanking ritual, Vallejo style, because someone opened an “NSFW” link, and “corporate culture” dictates that kind of punishment must be performed.
Hi there, I'm the writer of the article. Apologies for the inconvenience. I have now replaced the image with the most naked women with a less naked one. Furthermore, I have added an NSFW badge to the top of the article (next to the date).
Sorry again. It was thoughtless of me not to add some sort of label. I hope this remediates it now.
It is also interesting that when I ask ChatGPT to create an image inspired by Vallejo or Frank Frazetta, I get hit by content policy violation. I don’t see anything indecent about heroic fantasy. Oh well c'est la vie.
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.
Hey, I remember that sabre tooth picture! I'm having a "meeting a famous person moment" :-D
Wow I remember the floating baby head! Yah this was the waning days for sure.. I think I'm a few years ahead of you. The demo scene back then was something else, sneakernet and illicit basement bazaars...
I wasnt alive when you did this but those are incredible!
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.
You started later but still made an everlasting impact with masters like Ra, Made and others...
Awesome work!
And shoutout to the demosceners here - mode13h for the win!
The demoscene needs you back, Saffron!
Yeah it's about time y'all make a Contour final
Just need to find the floppy with the Direct3D 6.0 SDK…
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!
Ha, Boris is my neighbor. I used to see him and Julie walking their dog frequently, but it's mostly Julie now. I knew that they were painters, but I didn't appreciate who they were until recently and it's better that way. We say "Hi" to each other as we pass and go do our own thing.
* from Peru
Link to your wife's work?
"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.
> I've found that limitation in artistic mediums can serve as motivation and even inspiration in art.
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?
For more (great stuff) in this vein, check out Lars von Trier's The Five Obstructions.
A perfect illustration of how limitations can push an artist to think in new ways
If that's glitch art the way I understand glitch art, then it's only volatile and uncooperative because its practitioners want it to be. The majority of people I've seen glitching circuits have no understanding of what they're doing, actively resist gaining any, and then act frustrated when the humidity changes and the glitch doesn't work anymore, or the chip dies after a few more tries.
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.
>limitation in artistic mediums can serve as motivation and even inspiration
Also known as: The quality of software is inversely proportional to the power of hardware.
It’s like discovering beauty in imperfection
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.
> when I studied anatomy ... group them together as major influence and study sources
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/
Brothers Hildebrandt, Jean Giraud, Richard Corben....
But not Darrel K. Sweet[0] (one of the more published artists). His people looked like bobbleheads. He wasn't really so good at getting the human form right.
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...
[3] https://ixgallery.com/artists/stephenhickman/
[4] https://www.rogerdean.com
I always felt Vallejo's figures pumped up for their figures vs Frazetta's worked for theirs.
That's a really good way of putting it.
I had forgotten about Sweet — yeah he was everywhere with his awkward looking artwork. I kind of loathe his color palette. (I loathe Vallejo's as well though.)
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."
And a direct link to the canvas cycling demo mentioned in the talk, as well as the blog describing it and a Q&A with Mark Ferrari:
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.
Thank you for sharing this incredible talk! Mark captures one of the main topics in art making perfectly: the power of limitations.
Also: “The environment was small enough that you could actually think about it”
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.
13-year-old me fantasised about working with big deterministic boxes; these days the boxes are much smaller and a little less deterministic, but I'd hope I'm still channeling that fantasy without shame, guilt or even self-consciousness.
Never even occurred to me that this art style would be something an adult should be ashamed of, but makes complete sense now that I thought about it. Reminds me of recent space marines 2 drama.
I'm out-of-the-loop, what Space Marines 2 drama?
Yes, it's fantasy. Well spotted.
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.
>Sadly, the video capabilities that made it so special eventually became its Achilles heel.
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.
It certainly has direct framebuffer access. But the bitplane representation where the bits of each pixel's value are spread out across multiple bytes can make certain kinds of updates very time consuming.
Yeah, that's what the video was discussing. Sorry, I got the terminology wrong.
It didn't exactly kill it. Wolfenstein being feasible on the PC and not the Amiga, was just a symptom of stagnation. The Amiga (as a promising commercial venture!) had doom (pun intended) written all over it even before Wolfenstein. Commodore ignored the Amiga for years and years.
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.
A1200 and A4000 could be hooked into a VGA monitor for the flickerless experience. The caveat was that the flicker-free display modes were added on top of old ones, which meant that, while you could run Workbench and most applications on the VGA monitor, all games ran in the obsolete PAL modes your VGA display couldn’t handle. This created a market for niche dual-mode displays, which solved the problem, but were a bit pricey.
I used a VGA monitor with my Amiga 1200 (with an adapter). It was not flickery at all and was full resolution.
Yes, I know. I had that setup myself. :)
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.
I remember that there was some sort of shareware with a 40 day trial that my brother ran, but it stayed at 40 days. They had removed the clock as a cost saving measure on the A1200.
Yup, pretty desperate.
It might have had a rocky transition, but it was also very badly mismanaged by Commodore.
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
Thank you for sharing, the paintings are pretty awesome
Really great!
While being obviously simpler than old school sci-fi/fantasy paperback covers, the scene arrangement and energy is spot on.
I like the high contrast in "Dragon Rider".
That was partly the photographer's fault.
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.
That was an error. I just found one of the negatives. They were 4 X 5 film.
I love "Fugitive" :-D
That was one of my earlier ones.
If you look at the ring on the lizard-finger, you'll see "CDM 84."
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.
Yes. Of course, there's plenty of skill to be developed in photographing, too.
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.)
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?
I never thought I'd ever have the occasion to mention this, but Golden Axe's artwork is due to Dermot Power: https://www.mobygames.com/game/199/golden-axe/promo/group-28...
I wonder if he was influenced by Vallejo.
https://dermotpower.com/
Well, the Golden Axe II cover was actually by Vallejo. The article links to his known game covers: https://vgdensetsu.net/2_BorisVallejo.html
The origin of the whole style seems to have been Frank Frazetta doing illustrations for pulp serials of Conan and John Carter of Mars, then book covers for Conan, then Gygax reads a whole load of pulp novels including Conan and builds a game system to play the adventures of those novels. Vallejo also did Conan art, and it seems his first book cover was for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Barbarian
There is a "Borisography" online if you want to explore his work.
The 80s had a different approach to nudity and body shapes. It fit in with the zeitgeist.
The 70's certainly did. The 80's is when everything started to get covered up.
As to why? I think you'll find Sir Mix-a-lot has some answers for you.
I was born in the mid 80s so I don't get this reference - what do you mean?
(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)
Boris Vallejo vs. Frank Frazetta
https://www.sequentialartistsworkshop.org/blog/2015/09/3388
Sigh... completely different styles, plus the guy nitpicked inferior BV images and compared them with FF's better works. BV also had several visceral and dirty fight scenes with Conan, yet the painter used some of BV's less detailed creations to prove his point.
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.
I loved this artist as a kid, Frank Frazetta too.
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...
That's not really a claim of the article, right about from the first sentence.
Oh hell yes, I really like the covers in that article you linked. It's just amusing to me that "A buff dude and a hot chick fighting dinosaurs on a volcano on mars" somehow is analogous to "Porting COBOL to Excel in TPS reports". The "Pair Programming" one at the end is good, because there is some sort of vague connection you could make with the image. It's like saying "by doing how to do this boring and specific thing you're KINDA JUST LIKE THE GUY ON THE COVER TOO SO YOU SHOULD TOTALLY BUY THIS BOOK". They say sex sells, but what does it sell? This is like an experiment in the most unsexy thing that sex could sell.
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.
I think Računari magazine had a couple of non-photo covers in that style, but maybe being a Galaksija spin-off gave them the connection to a F/SF artist?
And TTRPGs
> "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"
This comment exemplifies the puritanical view that nakedness is somehow bad or impure.
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.
I wish we'd drop it ourselves. It's excruciating living amongst people who will pick up torches and pitchforks when anyone under 18 is remotely exposed to sexual content, but shrug and look stupid when that same cohort goes on a shooting spree.
Ok but quite a lot of these naked women aren't merely unclothed, they're definitely suggestively and even erotically drawn.
Yes? This is fantasy art, not an anatomy book.
Not just puritans, but the other extreme as well will say it is objectification.
Attributing it all to puritans is misleading and even anachronistic. A direct link would be possible at the time when the phrase “puritanism sells” made sense, but a number of generations have alreafy been born into the “sex sells” world.
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.
Modesty is a virtue shared by many cultures throughout the world. It is not exclusive to the US or Puritans. And the US is not a cultural monolith. Millions of people in the US do not hold modesty as a virtue.
It is true that modesty is not an exclusively US puritan ideal, but the US has a disproportionately strong cultural influence on other societies.
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.
Facepook is just another textbook example of bureaucracy breaking loose. Companies that give them money (for ads) declare that “content” (i. e. everything that exists in this world) can be “SFW” and “NSFW”, and they only want the former. Ergo, women don't have breasts. End of story. All the excuses and exceptions corporate human robots invent afterwards are just irrelevant icing on the cake.
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.
Is the misspelling of FB an intentional Russian joke? I haven’t heard that one before, but I can probably not unhear it the next time I hear a Russian speaker say that word.
Sorry, that line was glued to my screen awaiting transmission, one letter fell down, then some illiterate peasant fixed it.
"Modesty" is culturally defined in the first place. What you would consider "modest" today often would be extremely immodest a century ago. And, conversely, some societies don't consider nudity to be immodest in and of itself.
This is a very big Americanism that's not common elsewhere, if you look at classical art anywhere, you'll see naked bodies galore.
The middle east has a lot of puritans, too.
I don’t think naked bodies are widely considered indecent in art. That’s just the puritans.
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.)
Which can be a powerful tool to provoke
They are riding dragons, not doing anything indecent.
Fair warning that some of the art is NSFW.
I know these types of images take hold in a 13-year-old boy’s mind and make him a lifelong fan, and for anyone who lived through that particular time and place, I understand the appeal. But for most everyone else, this is some cheesy artwork. I say that as someone who read more than my share of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
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.
Compare Vallejo to Frank Frazetta and it's immediately obvious why the latter is considered a master of fantastic art while the former is drifting towards obscurity.
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...
You might as well be comparing Slayer and Cannibal Corpse. Both styles have their place and they can be enjoyed in their own right.
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).
All art is cheesy. If you briefly find any of it profound it's only because in some aspect you are briefly a 13 year old boy full of awe and excitement.
That's what "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is diplomatically trying to say.
Art can evoke a wide range of reactions, and that's often what makes it so powerful and meaningful
Appreciating it requires a certain state of mind. A state of mind of a 13 year old boy, in one way or another, looking at Boris Valleyo painting.
Art resonates with people of all ages in different ways :)
In ways as different as one snowflake is from the other that falls next to it. ;-)
I'm not making any commentary on the art thereof.
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.
If this counts as NSFW, then browse with images enabled.
The National Gallery (of the UK) has this page one click from the homepage, "Our most famous paintings"
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/must-sees
This does in fact count as NSFW in every workplace I've ever been in. Perhaps stop trying to argue with the poster who was merely trying to give people a friendly warning just so they know they might get in trouble if someone sees them looking at this art at work.
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.
> All we can do is work around them.
No. You could quit and be free.
I mean, yes: Not Safe For Work implies it's safe outside of work.
Though some might argue it's also Not Safe For Wife too, YMMV.
^ I missed the negation. I meant to write "If this counts as NSFW, browse with images disabled".
So, you're telling us that NSFW material belongs in Kenya and other places curating content? https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ How hypocritical.
I can actually imagine “venture capitalist investors” participating in some oiled spanking ritual, Vallejo style, because someone opened an “NSFW” link, and “corporate culture” dictates that kind of punishment must be performed.
Normal people, not so much.
Hi there, I'm the writer of the article. Apologies for the inconvenience. I have now replaced the image with the most naked women with a less naked one. Furthermore, I have added an NSFW badge to the top of the article (next to the date). Sorry again. It was thoughtless of me not to add some sort of label. I hope this remediates it now.
And that's the argument you'd go with at work?
It is also interesting that when I ask ChatGPT to create an image inspired by Vallejo or Frank Frazetta, I get hit by content policy violation. I don’t see anything indecent about heroic fantasy. Oh well c'est la vie.
ChatGPT also refuses to make pictures of yoghurt. It's refined by a special flavour of prudes.
That's what happens when you let Dark Helmet dictate the outputs.
"Yogurt! Yogurt! I hate Yogurt! Even with Strawberries."
It’s a copyright thing not the nudity.
I was about to say that it felt very Gorean, but then I realized _duh_ there's a reason why.
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".
Based Mr. Nagle dialing in the bants.