Deluxe Paint II

Deluxe Paint II came hot on the heels of Paintworks Plus, and sold itself as a major upgrade. To help convert Paintworks Plus users, Electronic Arts offered Deluxe Paint II at half price if they sent in the front page of their manual.

Dan Silva developed the original Deluxe Paint for the newly released Amiga computer platform two years earlier. Electronic Arts was particularly keen to develop for the Amiga; Trip Hawkins, one time Apple employee and Electronic Arts founder and CEO, was impressed by the new platform released by Commodore.

Deluxe Paint II was indeed a worthy successor to Paintworks Plus. Requiring only an additional 256k to Paintworks' 512k memory requirement, Deluxe Paint II offered a great deal more for serious artists. Deluxe Paint offered features that future paint programs needed to include to keep up - the ability to make any area of an image a brush, stenciling (or masking), using a spare page (which is similiar to using layers), allowing the use of the 640 by 200 super hi-res mode (using 4 true colours instead of 16 dithered colours), colour cycling, different brush modes and the ability to distort images in many different ways.

The program has its drawbacks however. Tools' appearance and behaviour differed a bit from Paintworks, and the non-compliance of using standard File menu shortcuts must have been a headache. There's no online help either, so you'll need to refer to the manual for the finer points of the program (including shortcuts).