First on paper to figure out the concept. At this point I had a black and white scanner, so I could scan a pencil sketch in a different program as a starting po

First on paper to figure out the concept. At this point I had a black and white scanner, so I could scan a pencil sketch in a different program as a starting point. I think I brought in the grayscale scan into DP, extracted essential 1-bit outlines, then wiped out the palette except for that outline color. I definitely had photo reference for the realistic elements like water reflections and the doll face. These were newspaper and magazine clippings that I collected for the purpose. I’d look at the reference while drawing. Designing the color palette was a surprisingly difficult problem. Using all the 256 colors would drive you crazy when trying to switch between them. DP had shortcut keys to navigate the palette in increments of one and 16, so a decent strategy was to make roughly value-equivalent color gradients with 16 or 32 shades. Then you could use the +1/-1 palette shortcut to change the value and the +16/-16 shortcut to change the hue. With the color palette in place, the first step was to block out everything using colors at roughly 4-step increments within the hue gradients. That produced a jagged color sketch that could be used to set the design in place. And then just finish with tedious manual pixel work over the 320*200 buffer. The built-in tools like Smooth and Gradient were not really useful if you cared about good antialiasing and dithering. It was something like a point of pride to do this manually.