Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene

marincomics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 123 posts

Re: Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene

#51

Post by lcrz »

voidUpdate wrote: post #48

> "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.

Re: Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene

#52

Post by throwawayk7h »

lcrz wrote: post #51
voidUpdate wrote: post #48

> "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.

Ok but quite a lot of these naked women aren't merely unclothed, they're definitely suggestively and even erotically drawn.

Re: Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene

#53

Post by black_knight »

throwawayk7h wrote: post #52
lcrz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene

#54

Post by VoodooJuJu »

lcrz wrote: post #51
voidUpdate wrote: post #48

> "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.

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.

Re: Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene

#55

Post by black_knight »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #54
lcrz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene

#56

Post by pksebben »

lcrz wrote: post #51
voidUpdate wrote: post #48

> "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.

Re: Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene

#58

Post by veunes »

shit_game wrote: post #8

"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 a…

It’s like discovering beauty in imperfection

Re: Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene

#59

Post by pavlov »

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.

Re: Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene

#60

Post by Etheryte »

voidUpdate wrote: post #48

> "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 is a very big Americanism that's not common elsewhere, if you look at classical art anywhere, you'll see naked bodies galore.
Post reply on HN