That King Tut image was really sensational back then, at least for early teenage me, and for a computer that was within imaginable reach (the Amiga, of course).
Avril is also listed as an artist in many other lucasarts games, including Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Also in Prince of Persia (just for the title screen [0], if I understand well).
Definitely, she's one of the outstanding pixel artists in history. All the Deluxe Paint demo images are hers and are mind-blowing [1]. You can identify her works by the "AH" signature, often discretely embedded in some texture.
You can tell it's a really professional project because I wrote a press release for the last version:
---------------------------------------------
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
2022-12-13 / SCUMWAYS TOP SECRET VOLCANO LAIR
Art World Rocked by Amazing New EvilPixie Release
New version features vibrant, brand new pixels.
Scumways Corp. today announced a new release of it's legendary pixel-editing application EvilPixie.
The new '0.3 "Your in test" TCE Shanghai Gutter' release is a revolutionary new development providing an experience unlike any other pixel art package in the history of pixel art packages[1].
With a huge established audience of dedicated fans[2], this new release promises to take the industry by storm.
Scumways Corp. spokesman Brian Credibility today said "Our studies show that this new release provides 754.1% more synergy than the next leading brand. The clients we've been working rave about increased pixel yields, and love the enterprise-wide approach to the unique value proposition when integrated into quadruple-A next-generation middle-out distributed landscape personal environment cloud-based network-enabled local client ecosystems."
Via séance, notable artists have also given their unanimous endorsement:
"I'll definitely be using this to demonstrate Commodore's next computer." - Spirit of Andy Warhol
"Questa fantastica app sono i fottuti testicoli del cane!" - Spirit of Leonardo Da Vinci
"Se ve un poco raro" - Spirit of Salvador Dali
EvilPixie is hand crafted from organic, fair trade, ethically-sourced local electrons. It's very Eco.
The new version can be downloaded at:
[1] Except Deluxe Paint, which it apes shamelessly, down to the keyboard shortcuts. And all the Dpaint clones, of course. And asesprite. And ProMotion. And all the other pixelart apps. But other than that, there's _nothing_ like it out there!
[2] The programmer and his 11-year old daughter, who use it occasionally.
Groovy, I love the zoom! any plans to implement color cycling with tab like in the good old days? I used to spend hours tripping out to cool color cycling...
I'm a firmware programmer and don't know much about windows, but how easy/hard is it to build for windows? +1 for "Brian Credibility"
I definitely want Palette colour cycling!
But getting some support in there for layers is my current priority.
Development is driven by whatever missing feature currently annoys me the most :-)
I use https://www.mingw-w64.org for the windows build - which makes it nice and easy to get the compiler and dependencies installed (Qt, libpng, libjpeg, giflib).
Once you've got the dependencies set up it Just Works (tm), on Linux, Windows and Mac (although I don't have a mac to build/test on these days).
It was the first piece of software I paid real money for. It had to be imported from Germany and the guy who sold it to me told me I was a fool as he could have copied it for me for he price of the floppy disks.
If you like DeluxePaint and Free software, do not forget GrafX2 - http://grafx2.chez.com/ a project dating from the 90s which is a direct descendant of it (pixel art UI included) but still updated !
I miss the old UI pattern of right-click switching between tools and workspace. Even today I can't seem to get a screenful of tools without sacrificing the area dedicated to the project.
Very cool! I never managed to do anything in Deluxe Paint except for maybe a stick figure or something like that, or just random shapes/colors. Since then I’ve always been curious, what is the process to make an image like the one you made?
First on paper to figure out the concept. At this point I had a black and white scanner, so I could scan a pencil sketch in a different program as a starting point. I think I brought in the grayscale scan into DP, extracted essential 1-bit outlines, then wiped out the palette except for that outline color.
I definitely had photo reference for the realistic elements like water reflections and the doll face. These were newspaper and magazine clippings that I collected for the purpose. I’d look at the reference while drawing.
Designing the color palette was a surprisingly difficult problem. Using all the 256 colors would drive you crazy when trying to switch between them. DP had shortcut keys to navigate the palette in increments of one and 16, so a decent strategy was to make roughly value-equivalent color gradients with 16 or 32 shades. Then you could use the +1/-1 palette shortcut to change the value and the +16/-16 shortcut to change the hue.
With the color palette in place, the first step was to block out everything using colors at roughly 4-step increments within the hue gradients. That produced a jagged color sketch that could be used to set the design in place. And then just finish with tedious manual pixel work over the 320*200 buffer.
The built-in tools like Smooth and Gradient were not really useful if you cared about good antialiasing and dithering. It was something like a point of pride to do this manually.
If you ever played a Williams Bally/Midway pinball machine from the 1990s dot-matrix era (Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness, etc), all of the artwork and animation for those displays was done entirely by hand in Deluxe Paint Animation for MSDOS.
The features like stenciling and animbrush were incredibly powerful. And with a little bit of extra software the exported files could be converted directly into a format for the game software to use.
I'm no graphic artist, but I remember using DP for this and that in the mid-90's. It was a fantastic piece of software -- it exploited all the machine had to offer, but moreso, all the tools / affordances were tuned just so. It was purpose-made, and it served it's purpose extremely well. The incredibly creative visual artifacts of games and demos of that day stand as testament.
Deluxe Paint II Enhanced and Deluxe Paint Animation for DOS represent. Fantavision honorable mention. A decade later: 3D Studio, Maya, and Kai's Power Goo.
(Couldn't afford an Amiga or a Macintosh, and a PC.)
55 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadAvril is also listed as an artist in many other lucasarts games, including Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Also in Prince of Persia (just for the title screen [0], if I understand well).
Definitely, she's one of the outstanding pixel artists in history. All the Deluxe Paint demo images are hers and are mind-blowing [1]. You can identify her works by the "AH" signature, often discretely embedded in some texture.
[0] https://www.abandonware-france.org/ltf_abandon/ltf_galeries....
[1] https://amiga.lychesis.net/assets/AvrilHarrison/
https://betawiki.net/wiki/Paint#/media/File:Windows_1.0_alph...
1:1 preview was crucial on CRTs where pixels weren't neat little squares.
You can tell it's a really professional project because I wrote a press release for the last version:
---------------------------------------------
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
2022-12-13 / SCUMWAYS TOP SECRET VOLCANO LAIR
Art World Rocked by Amazing New EvilPixie Release
New version features vibrant, brand new pixels.
Scumways Corp. today announced a new release of it's legendary pixel-editing application EvilPixie.
The new '0.3 "Your in test" TCE Shanghai Gutter' release is a revolutionary new development providing an experience unlike any other pixel art package in the history of pixel art packages[1].
With a huge established audience of dedicated fans[2], this new release promises to take the industry by storm.
Scumways Corp. spokesman Brian Credibility today said "Our studies show that this new release provides 754.1% more synergy than the next leading brand. The clients we've been working rave about increased pixel yields, and love the enterprise-wide approach to the unique value proposition when integrated into quadruple-A next-generation middle-out distributed landscape personal environment cloud-based network-enabled local client ecosystems."
Via séance, notable artists have also given their unanimous endorsement:
EvilPixie is hand crafted from organic, fair trade, ethically-sourced local electrons. It's very Eco. The new version can be downloaded at:https://github.com/bcampbell/evilpixie/releases
[1] Except Deluxe Paint, which it apes shamelessly, down to the keyboard shortcuts. And all the Dpaint clones, of course. And asesprite. And ProMotion. And all the other pixelart apps. But other than that, there's _nothing_ like it out there!
[2] The programmer and his 11-year old daughter, who use it occasionally.
I use https://www.mingw-w64.org for the windows build - which makes it nice and easy to get the compiler and dependencies installed (Qt, libpng, libjpeg, giflib). Once you've got the dependencies set up it Just Works (tm), on Linux, Windows and Mac (although I don't have a mac to build/test on these days).
https://worms2d.info/Colour_map_(first_generation)
https://anioni.com/pauli/site1999/work/seqjesus.html
I think I spent 40-50 hours on it, trying to ensure every pixel is right. Teenagers have time...
I definitely had photo reference for the realistic elements like water reflections and the doll face. These were newspaper and magazine clippings that I collected for the purpose. I’d look at the reference while drawing.
Designing the color palette was a surprisingly difficult problem. Using all the 256 colors would drive you crazy when trying to switch between them. DP had shortcut keys to navigate the palette in increments of one and 16, so a decent strategy was to make roughly value-equivalent color gradients with 16 or 32 shades. Then you could use the +1/-1 palette shortcut to change the value and the +16/-16 shortcut to change the hue.
With the color palette in place, the first step was to block out everything using colors at roughly 4-step increments within the hue gradients. That produced a jagged color sketch that could be used to set the design in place. And then just finish with tedious manual pixel work over the 320*200 buffer.
The built-in tools like Smooth and Gradient were not really useful if you cared about good antialiasing and dithering. It was something like a point of pride to do this manually.
It might be obvious to gamers, but the idea is that you have one hand on the keyboard, and the other on the mouse.
Building assets like this is unthinkable today since games are run on a variety of resolutions...all of which are enormous compared to EGA/VGA.
The features like stenciling and animbrush were incredibly powerful. And with a little bit of extra software the exported files could be converted directly into a format for the game software to use.
Twilight Zone is my favorite pinball machine of all time.
Another one via DosBox https://classicreload.com/dosx-deluxe-paint-animation.html
Anyone know if they used dp2?
Amazing what 320x200 pixels can achieve with 32 colors.
http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ (hit "Show Options)
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0
I've love to play a game where each screen was precisely that.
(Couldn't afford an Amiga or a Macintosh, and a PC.)
"The importance of Exuberance in User Experience" (Site seems to be down right now, but the wayback machine has it) https://web.archive.org/web/20160611170615/http://designblog...