How did Jim Sachs paint ?

[amiga-penn-wchester]

As far as I know, and from looking at his art as a kid in c64 magazines... I believe he started out on the C64 and was just a pixel artist.  The c64 stuff worked around the color limitations and he used adjacent pixel "natural blur" of the coarse chroma-luma monitors of the time to create some nice gradient effects.

On the amiga, I'd have to say deluxepaint, because his works came out quite early, and there really wasn't much else than dpaint II/III when his work was apparent.  His work translated well because coming from 64, on amiga you had enough gradient colors if you as a pixel artist could dither well, even in 32, let alone halfbrite.

short answer is I don't know for sure.

[amiga-penn-wchester]

Yeah, I thought the bitmap brothers did a great job with anti-aliasing and making 32 colors look impressive. Not sure if they used any more than 32 on the OCS/ECS stuff.  Most of their stuff is subdued and on the dark end of things, so they could use color 0 (black) to their advantage to get some extra detail.  Gods/Speedball II are good examples of this.

Sachs, on the other hand just painted real world objects mostly, but I think as stills, and without HAM mode, they're some of the best examples of early 16 bit art.

Can't mention game graphics without mentioning psygnosis' SOTB series, I still think they're all excellent, regardless of gameplay....