How did Jim Sachs paint ?

[rednova]

Dear Friends:

How did Jim Sachs paint his amiga game/pics ?
Did he directly paint in deluxe paint, or did he scan his drawings ?
I am an apprentice artist, and I would love to paint like Jim Sachs did,
so I can make new amiga games with high quality graphic content.
Thank you !!!

rednova

[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.

[Forcie]

I would say perhaps some quick sketches on paper and then careful pixel placement by hand in DPaint. He obviously had a great skill at making the most of the palettes and doing dithering manually. You just have to do stuff like this a lot to get the "feel" for it - there are no absolute rules and set techniques. His C64 art experience most likely helped a lot on the way.

[ddniUK]

To save readers some Google work, heres a link to his art

http://www.palmerfamily.name/sachs.html

[hbarcellos]

And what about The Bitmap Brothers? I think they're really unique on that style.
Too bad their current strategy is a little bit confusing. With the exception of Speedball II what was finally re-released for the iOS they're website is a real mess full of stories about unreleased games and etc.

They were my favorite Amiga company and, unlike others, like DMA Design, they're quite obscure right now. Bad Management?

[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....