The Tool of Choice for a Generation

Before Photoshop dominated the world, there was Deluxe Paint. Released in 1985 by a young company called Electronic Arts, “DPaint” was the killer app for the Commodore Amiga. It didn’t just allow people to draw; it invented the workflow for digital art that is still used by pixel artists today.

The Vision: “Software Artists”

In the early 80s, EA was founded on the idea that software developers were artists. They packaged their games in “Album Sleeves” with liner notes. To prove the Amiga’s graphical dominance, they commissioned programmer Dan Silva to build the ultimate art tool.

What Silva created was a masterpiece of UI design.

Features That Changed Everything

DPaint introduced concepts that felt like magic in 1985:

1. The Custom Brush

In most programs (like MacPaint), a brush was a dot or a square. In DPaint, anything could be a brush. You could use the selection tool to grab a drawing of a tree, and suddenly your mouse cursor was that tree. You could stamp it a hundred times to create a forest. You could resize it, rotate it, or smear it across the screen. This “Cut and Stamp” workflow is the foundation of tile-based game design.

2. Color Cycling (Palette Animation)

DPaint exposed the Amiga’s hardware palette to the artist. You could define a range of colors (e.g., 4 shades of blue) and tell the software to “cycle” them. The pixels didn’t change, but the colors in the palette shifted. This allowed artists to create:

Flowing waterfalls.
Pulsing spaceship lights.
Shimmering gold coins. All without using any extra memory or CPU for animation frames.

3. Symmetry and Perspective

DPaint included a “Kaleidoscope” mode (Symmetry). You could draw in one quadrant, and it would mirror your strokes in real-time across the X and Y axes. Later versions (DPaint III and IV) added 3D perspective mapping, allowing you to take a flat drawing and wrap it onto a sphere or rotate it in 3D space—a feature used heavily to create the spinning logos of the Demoscene.

4. Stencil Mode

A precursor to modern “Layers,” Stencil Mode allowed you to “lock” certain colors. You could paint a background, lock it, and then paint a character over it without worrying about messing up the background. If you erased the character, the background remained.

The Industry Standard

For a decade, DPaint was the tool.

LucasArts: The lush backgrounds of The Secret of Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis were pixel-pushed in DPaint.
Westwood Studios: The units in Command & Conquer and Dune II were drawn and animated in DPaint.
id Software: Adrian Carmack used the DOS port (Deluxe Paint II Enhanced) to create the textures and sprites for Doom and Wolfenstein 3D.

The LBM / IFF Format

DPaint established the IFF (Interchange File Format) standard, specifically the ILBM (Interleaved Bitmap) image format. This became the standard way to save graphics on the Amiga. Even on the PC, the LBM format was widely used in game development because it supported the color palettes and compression (RLE) that games needed.

The Legacy of Dan Silva

Dan Silva eventually left EA to join the team that created Autodesk 3D Studio (now 3ds Max). His understanding of UI and tool design helped shape the 3D revolution.

But for pixel artists, DPaint remains the holy grail. Modern tools like Aseprite, Pro Motion NG, and GrafX2 are unapologetic clones of Deluxe Paint. They use the same keyboard shortcuts (j for filled shape, b for brush) and the same logic. If you learned DPaint in 1989, you can pick up Aseprite in 2026 and feel right at home.

Technical Modules

Technical Demo: Rotozoomer - Texture rotation and scaling effects relied on high-quality artwork drawn in tools like Deluxe Paint.
Technical Demo: Tunnel - The textures for tunnel effects were often drawn as seamless tiles in DPaint.

Source & Further Reading

“The Amiga Part 4: Deluxe Paint” by Jimmy Maher: A cultural history of the software.
Original Deluxe Paint II Manual: Browsing the professional documentation of the 1980s.
“The History of Pixel Art”: How hardware limitations shaped the aesthetic.
Electronic Arts Historical Archives: Highlighting the early vision of “Software as Art.”