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".
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.
"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?
>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.
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.
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.
Thank you for sharing, the paintings are pretty awesome
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.)
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.
Well, the Golden Axe II cover was actually by Vallejo. The article links to his known game covers: https://vgdensetsu.net/2_BorisVallejo.html
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...
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.
That's not really a claim of the article, right about from the first sentence.
And TTRPGs
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.