I used to be a teenage demoscene graphics artist back in the waning days of the Amiga and earliest days of Windows-based demos.

Vallejo was definitely a popular source and influence. But demoscene graphics were really more of a technical competition than expressive art. The participants were teenagers — it was pretty obvious that most 16-year-old boys don't paint like Frazetta while also having mastered the skills for rendering those visions in 32 colors.

There was great appreciation for technical factors like palette tricks, elegant hand-made dithering, and how to do antialiasing without a soft look. It was pretty easy to tell if an image was actually hand-pixeled vs. an overpainted scan. On a 320*240 image, every detail is conspicuous. You quickly develop an eye for the hand-made detail.

I took a quick look at my old hand-pixelled images to see if there's a Vallejo. I never did the straight-up fantasy pictures, but I think the large sabretooth in this drawing must be from a fantasy painting:

https://anioni.com/pauli/site1999/work/katka.html

I made this at age 16 in Deluxe Paint IIe on the PC, so it's got the full 256-color palette. The somewhat random color explosions on the sabretooth definitely show both palette excitement and Vallejo influence.

The two cats are clearly from different sources. I didn't use scans, just worked the outlines from the sources (maybe with the help of tracing paper or something). It took around 40-50 hours to hand-pixel an image like this. In the bottom-left corner I've added the date and time when it was completed, clearly relieved that it was finally finished...

This is the last hand-pixeled image I did in 1998:

https://anioni.com/pauli/site1999/work/seqjesus.html

It's a much better picture! By this time it was obvious that pixel graphics are a relic, nobody seemed to care about my antialiasing anymore, and I moved on.