MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today

https://blog.decryption.net.au/posts/macpaint.html

by decryption • 1 year ago

1057 191 1 year ago

blog.decryption.net.au

aidos• 1 year ago

Love it.

At the end of the article they mention digging in to the Amiga scene. If you want to feel old, Deluxe Paint turns 40 this year. My mates had Amigas (I had an Amstrad) and the computing world just felt full of wonder and promise. It was a magical time of creation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint

xgkickt2• 1 year ago

As one of the images states: “Happy Computing to all, And may all your computing be a Delight!”.

gxd• 1 year ago

Awesome! You can also find great art made with Deluxe Paint for the Amiga. The limitations from early computers in resolution and, most importantly, palette, create unique art styles:

https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/DeluxePaint.html

keyringlight• 1 year ago

There was an article posted here not too long about with a similar sentiment about the NEC PC-98

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44076501

ekianjo• 1 year ago

some better ones here

https://amiga.lychesis.net/applications/AmigaDealer.html

andrepd• 1 year ago

Loved this dive on one such Deluxe Paint piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4

dan-robertson• 1 year ago

These seem worse IMO. Not sure if it’s the medium (eg more saturated colours, the particular website) or if I just like the compositions less.

zozbot2344• 1 year ago

They have more color but way less resolution, thus less detail. Pretty much what you would expect to see, given that the original Mac and Amiga came out around the same time.

justsomehnguy• 1 year ago

The usual case of looking at pictures what was made on and for a CRT monitor (or even TV).

You can try Screenitron to imitate something like this.

https://littlebattlebits.xyz/screenitron

mock-possum• 1 year ago

Using colour cycling to achieve animation-like effects is so hot.

corysama• 1 year ago

Can't mention that without linking the master of the effect

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ (hit "Show Options")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

p0w3n3d3• 1 year ago

The colour palette of Amiga is really appealing to me. I used to love watching game screenshots printed in games magazines available in my country.

That's how I fell in love with Monkey Island and Flashback

reconnecting9• 1 year ago

Then we should probably mention

http://macpaint.org

(From page HTML source)

Does anyone even remember why Netscape 4 was bad?

numtel• 1 year ago

I think it was a total rewrite, similar to why Winamp 2 was great, fast, not bloated but Winamp 3 was slow, adding extraneous features nobody wanted.

reconnecting9• 1 year ago

True, Winamp 2 was much solid. Unless I'm mistaken Winamp 3 introduce skins and after absolute madness starts.

jfim• 1 year ago

NN4 tended to crash more than NN3, it may have been due to the rushed development during the browser wars.

reconnecting9• 1 year ago

There was problem with styles and tables.

https://sbpoley.home.xs4all.nl/webmatters/netscape4.html

spydum• 1 year ago

Browsers were changing quickly back then, but if anybody remembers, it became Netscape Communicator and tried to expand to do everything..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator#:~:text=Thi...

reconnecting9• 1 year ago

If I'm not mistaken Netscape Communicator was just a pack of different applications, including NN. The real issue seems to be was specific CSS and some style rendering.

cmrdporcupine• 1 year ago

From vague memories I remember NN4 on classic MacOS was, I recall, a total memory leaking / crashing shitshow. I worked in a shop that had a bunch of Macs and the rule was you couldn't run FileMaker (which they used a lot) and Netscape at the same time because the two would just run over each other memories. The glory days of lack of memory protection on MacOS 7.6.

But I also don't think 3 was much better.

giantrobot3• 1 year ago

Does anyone even remember why Netscape 4 was bad?

Netscape 4 is a broad set of releases over several years. It also wasn't necessarily "bad". It was just largely not mindblowingly better than Netscape 3 (for normal users) while using more CPU and RAM.

I also imagine in this context it's incomplete CSS support is problematic. Netscape 3 will ignore properly commented out CSS (mostly) while 4 will try to interpret what it can and choke on the rest. It's box model doesn't conform to where the CSS spec landed so even if you can give it CSS it can handle, your page is broken in every other browser.

reconnecting9• 1 year ago

I'm jealous of your memory capabilities, and I certainly remember that at some point it was nearly impossible to make website looks in similar way in Netscape and IE.

At the end, there was something like acceptable variation in page view for different browsers.

kragen• 1 year ago

Well, like the comment said, it crashed a lot when you tried to run JS on it. It was pretty annoying to binary-search for a bug in your JS when the symptom was a browser crash. Also, it used a lot more RAM than Netscape 3 and was slower, but I don't recall it being better in significant ways.

DHTML in Netscape 4 was also completely incompatible with DHTML in IE 4. In IE you had the DOM, which is an inconvenient and inherently very inefficient interface that you could coerce into doing anything you wanted. In Netscape 4 you had layers. Our team (KnowNow) was working on an AJAX and Comet toolkit at the time (02000). In order to not write separate versions of our Comet applications for the two browsers, we stuck to the least common denominator, which was basically framesets and document.write.

reconnecting9• 1 year ago

Indeed, browsers learned how to hurt people from their earliest days.

Mizza• 1 year ago

That first one looks like a parody of 'View of the World from 9th Avenue' but I don't know what Acius was!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...

decryption3• 1 year ago

I wish I knew what Acius was or is too!

B1FF_PSUVM• 1 year ago

From a search for "acius mac": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4th_Dimension_(software)

Software outfit founded by a French guy, as hinted by the drawing with Paris visible ...

(Those "view from ..." were plentiful at the time)

perihelions2• 1 year ago

I think the .png images on this website are larger than the uncompressed originals (1-bit depth, 1 bit per pixel).

decryption3• 1 year ago

Yep, I upscaled them by 400% so they’re easier to view on modern displays.

perihelions2• 1 year ago

I know; I mean to say they're larger file sizes—the PNG compression ratio is effectively less than one.

Take the first one, "acius.png", at 84,326 bytes. If you losslessly scale back to the original size (1/4th) and convert to 1-bit NetPBM, it's 51,851 bytes, without compression. I thought that was remarkable.

zozbot2344• 1 year ago

Thanks for finding this! A relic from a more civilized age.

RayBarfing• 1 year ago

rembrandt paintings from the 17th century still look great today

spankibalt• 1 year ago

Yeah. Seems that art might be... timeless.

nntwozz• 1 year ago

The loading time for this artwork has a quality all of its own.

poisonborz• 1 year ago

I envy that small world, where people could be this genuinely enthusiastic about their computer products and companies, where most actors seeked the best interest of other parties.

anthk5• 1 year ago

The UXN people did similart art too: https://xxiivv.com

https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/noodle.html

fifticon• 1 year ago

so does roman mosaics :-)

promiseofbeans2• 1 year ago

The 2nd artwork ('A Door Somewhere " - Bert Monrov) had me really confused for a moment. When I scrolled down to it, there was a sort of flickering effect, like as if it were a gif, with a flickering light adding ambience to the scene.

But no, it's just how that sort of black & white shading looks when you scroll past it - amazing effect!

donkeybeer2• 1 year ago

What monitor do you have?

promiseofbeans2• 1 year ago

This was on an OLED Samsung phone, screen running at 120Hz

SSLy• 1 year ago

As the neighbour mentions, it's only a case of your display having ghosting. This effect is not present on eg. OLED screens.

seabombs• 1 year ago

There's a term I read about a long time ago, I think it was "aesthetic completeness" or something like that. It was used in the context of video games whose art direction was fully realized in the game, i.e. increases in graphics hardware or capabilities wouldn't add anything to the game in an artistic sense. The original Homeworld games were held up as examples.

Anyway, this reminded me of that. Making these pictures in anything but the tools of the time wouldn't just change them, they'd be totally different artworks. The medium is part of the artwork itself.

lukan5• 1 year ago

Hm, are you sure that there is not some nostalgia at play here?

To me they look horribly pixelated and at least some would improve aesthetically a lot for me with a higher resolution.

zozbot2344• 1 year ago

Even today these pictures have an almost perfect resolution for showing on a compact e-paper display. The viewing area on the original Mac models was not that much bigger, either. They only look "horribly pixelated" when artificially upscaled for a modern big screen.

(A pixel-art specific upscaling filter would mitigate that issue, of course.)

fwipsy• 1 year ago

Of course there's a subjective element, but I was born about a decade after these were created and I find them to be beautiful. I love the mural with the tree, it's amazing how it creates a sense of openness that wants me to go outside, even with such a limited palette.

anthk5• 1 year ago

You have no idea on how charming these games look.

const_cast• 1 year ago

Many new games are released today with pixel art because that's the aesthetic they want to portray.

Some games, like Borderlands or Wind Waker, use aggressive cell shading. They age like wine, because the game has a distinct art style that gives it character.

tumnus• 1 year ago

Your opinion isn't popular, but I agree with you. Taking just the first image as an example... this is a digital recreation/modification of a Saul Steinberg cover for the New Yorker originally done in 1976. This cover created a extremely popular subgenre of stylized map drawing at the time, but the Mac version looks like mostly clip art images all splodged together with no real sense of composition or perspective. There are many other examples in here which I feel were made by people who happened to have access to the technology, but did not necessarily have great artistic ability.

That being said, although there are also some extremely good examples in here (in my subjective opinion), I absolutely think there is a nostalgia element at play. I worked on these machines in the 80s and feel that nostalgia myself.

al_borland2• 1 year ago

I have to imagine that fully realizing a vision can only truly take place when the artists are not working at the limits of the present day tools. I’m thinking of something like games today that choose an art style and run with it, rather than trying to push the hardware as hard as possible.

Was this the artist’s vision, or were they simply making the best of the tools they had?

zozbot2344• 1 year ago

Pixel art is very much still around today, even though it's far from "pushing" the limits of current hardware. It's pursuing a rather consistent "vision" of maximizing quality while staying within the bounds of a predefined level of detail (i.e. resolution) and color depth.

nine_k• 1 year ago

I'd say that the nearly opposite is often true: the limitations shape art and even make it art. The masterful handling of limitations, and doing apparently impossible, is a legitimate part of art.

Academic Western poetry shed the metre and the rhyme in an attempt to be free from limitations and more fully express things. Can you quote something impressive? OTOH rap, arguably the modern genre of folk poetry, holds very firmly to the limiting metre and rhyme, and somehow stays quite popular. If rappers did not need rhyme as a tool of artistic expression, they probably would abandon it, instead of becoming sophisticated at it.

Same with pixel art, and other forms of pushing your medium to the limits, and beyond.

timoth3y• 1 year ago

The same holds true for everything from cave paintings to Roman frescos. It's part of human expression. The tools of that expression shape it.

For example, Bach's music was shaped by the fact that the harpsichord had no sustain. The piano changed that, but "upscaling" Bach's work to take advantage of this new technology would destroy them. You use the new technology to play them as they were written for the old. The beauty comes through despite the change.

dahart2• 1 year ago

Switched on Bach is one of my favorite albums of all time.

madaxe_again2• 1 year ago

Similarly, Liszt made full use of what modern, powerful pianofortes are capable of - although were he a man of our times, he’d probably have been fronting a heavy metal band.

libraryatnight• 1 year ago

Understanding this point about cave paintings is crucial to not being a human piece of garbage.

drewlesueur• 1 year ago

This reminds me of how the pixel version of Chicago font looks great but the vector version doesn't.

https://x.com/susankare/status/1599662756252483585?s=46

xgkickt2• 1 year ago

Vib Ribbon is one example I can think of that also exhibits that property.

anton-c• 1 year ago

Thats an interesting concept. Considering it, the big first party titles certainly had stellar presentation art-wise. Doesn't seem like they were limited in achieving their vision in say, sonic the hedgehog. Even the later games with pseudo-3d the art direction makes it feel complete and like it fits the aesthetic.

And even the new ones that have gone back to that style have the same 'look'(obviously because they're trying to be like those old games) but the graphical fidelity doesn't seem to change much beyond more pixels.

techpineapple• 1 year ago

It’s interesting to think about the intersection of cultural, technology and aesthetic.

Gaming embraces most of its historical aesthetics while say movies do not. There aren’t serious attempts to replicate the aesthetic of 50’s tv (which are tied in heavily with the culture of the time) similarly, jn the eighties and I imagine prior, I’ve been watching Miami vice and you can tell lots of the rooms are cheap sets with pretty minimal props. This is on the one hand definetly not full formed, but on the other hand I’ve grown to appreciate that aesthetic, And again other art forms like painting and video games seem to appreciate all eras of aesthetics in their modern versions in a Way tv and movies don’t. (Maybe just due to expense?)

bane• 1 year ago

I was also considering the effect of how silent computing used to be. It created a tension and expectation when waiting for an image to appear like waiting for a curtain to open on a play. So when the artwork appeared, the artists worked to make it beautiful. It was almost pushing the edge of what these systems could do, and so as a viewer placed you in an engaging experience right at the state of the art.

mattbettinson• 1 year ago

Maybe recency bias cause I’m playing it right now, but Breath of the Wild comes to mind

tinco• 1 year ago

It might be but it's hard to tell because it's such a recent game. The Wind Waker might be a better example because it's now 20 years old and still renders and plays basically as if it's current gen on modern hardware.

z3c0• 1 year ago

I don't know, I think some improved hardware would greatly improve the aesthetics of the Lost Woods, which severely drops in frame rate when docked. Handheld, the diminished fidelity at 720p buys back some frames.

I'd be inclined to agree about some older Zelda games though, namely Wind Waker. I replayed it on GCN recently, and can attest that HD Wii U version really didn't add anything to the aesthetics.

AndrewStephens• 1 year ago

I am not a game purist and modern games are just fine, but I do not see the point of AAA games employing 300 artists to model blades of grass that have no gameplay effect. Sure, the screen shots lot great but unless you are making GrassSimulator2000 it would have been better to use those resources for something else.

dehrmann• 1 year ago

There's a solid chance GTA VI will include a lawn mowing minigame.

bredren• 1 year ago

As a person who spent a great deal of time restoring a long neglected backyard to include a small lawn to play on, I am interested in playing GrassSimulator2000.

noufalibrahim2• 1 year ago

When id was pushing the envelope of technology (mid to late 90s) and creating more and more startling games, I remember thinking that none of them really had the appeal of many of the earlier games. And apparently Carmack thought that the story etc. of the game wasn't important. Reading masters of DOOM and watching my 8 year old play DOOM on an emulator made me reconsider. He had a jumpscare in a way that would have been impossible unless the game was so immersive and that is a technological feat. I do agree with you that one can go too far but it's not wholly a pointless side quest.

SlowTao• 1 year ago

A lesser known title that I think hit that perfectly is Rez. So much so that the re-release almost 15 years later was for the most part, just higher resolution and cleaner rendering. But the overall style was not touched one bit.

commandersaki• 1 year ago

Sounds like they're describing Interstate 76.

st_phan• 1 year ago

Do you think you could find the article? It sounds super interesting.

I tried Claude and it mentioned the term might actually be „Aesthetic sufficiency“, but I couldn‘t find an essay with Homeworld on it.

niedzielski• 1 year ago

maybe https://www.gorzek.com/nonfiction/essays/homeworld/ which I found via https://duckduckgo.com/?q=aesthetic+completeness+%22homeworl....

tonijn• 1 year ago

Yes indeed! "The medium is the message" - Marshall McLuhan. Although you could also argue that "The interface is the message"

Hilift• 1 year ago

The review at the time was if you weren't a particularly good artist, MacPaint wouldn't change that.

lowwave• 1 year ago

Crazy to see 4D in there, is it actually a 4D poster with the big 4 in there?

taylorius• 1 year ago

The lack of photorealistic fidelity gives your brain a bit of room to use imagination to fill in the blanks in your internal model. This fosters a certain type of engagement with the content that you don't get with photorealistic images.

tombert3• 1 year ago

I think that's part of the reason that a lot of indie games have converged around pixel art.

Obviously a large part of it is likely due to the fact that a lot of the creators grew up with the NES or SNES and just like that aesthetic, but I think you get a lot of "implied detail" when using pixel art, which is great when you're working on a limited budget.

This isn't to knock it, to be clear. I love good pixel art.

anthk5• 1 year ago

YOu both are missing something. TV fuzzy rendering blended pixels together and FFVI under the SNES (and Chrono Trigger) could look astoundingly great with amazing colours and sprite art.

HPsquared• 1 year ago

Similarly, some cave paintings still look awesome.

https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/lascaux/

eddieroger• 1 year ago

Snark aside, that was my takeaway looking at the article. Why wouldn't they still look good? They were well done when they were made. The Mona Lisa still looks good. The tools don't define the quality, just the constraints. For grayscale pixel art, these are amazing pictures that hold up to the medium, regardless of if computers can do more now.

roughly• 1 year ago

One thing I read a while back noted that the cave paintings were also painted under and for specific lighting - namely, dim, flickering fire - and that under those conditions the paintings took on an even more expressive character.

What’s wild is that would be true for every single human work up to about the mid-1800s. Art - and architecture - would be made to be seen either in sunlight, with its attendant shadows and shifts throughout the day, or by firelight, which flickers and shifts on its own.

Dante690• 1 year ago

Really interesting. I’m wondering if there’s any LLM or image model on Hugging Face that has been trained specifically on low-res black-and-white images like MacPaint. Has anyone come across something similar or seen a fine-tuned model in this specific retro visual style?

sgt• 1 year ago

Not sure why you're being downvoted. I'd like to see this, too. Just for fun.

amelius• 1 year ago

I think it is downvoted because it would potentially harm the creative value of the original works.

briangriffinfan• 1 year ago

It's like... someone gives you a gift, and then you ask "Wow! Can I have arbitrarily more of these, please?" It's a lack of appreciation for what we have - instead of enjoying it, you want to press a button to create arbitrarily more of it. That is truly no appreciation at all.

JSR_FDED• 1 year ago

This dithering is somehow so pleasing. It’s like “sand dithering”.

wenc• 1 year ago

“Dithering” is the key — except this seems to have been done by hand.

When I was a kid, I owned a monochrome display that could only display at CGA resolutions “640x400” 1-bit (and 320x200). Many games and art and didn’t support that showed up garbled.

Then I got hold of Deluxe Paint that would load pictures in color and dither them with an algo called Floyd Steinberg. And the pictures that I saw on my friends VGA monitors suddenly looked beautiful on my monochrome screen.

See examples https://surma.dev/things/ditherpunk/

Games like Monkey Island were also ditherered for monochrome displays and they looked great.

kjellsbells• 1 year ago

The street scene is by Gerald Vaughn Clement, the inventor of MacGrid, a drawing program that used a sort of plastic grid to perform high detail drawing and digitization.

https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macgrid

Incidentially /r/VintagePixelArt often has discussions about this sort of thing.

Max-q• 1 year ago

The Amiga is quite another beast, especially showing photos in HAM mode, giving 4096 colors.

drewcoo• 1 year ago

Meh. It was nothing compared with PLATO systems at the university. And the CAD setups dad and his engineering team used for work then (Silicon Graphics?) also looked much better.

So maybe for some values of "great." Maybe.

cjcenizal• 1 year ago

I was born in ‘83 and a good chunk of my formative years were spent imagining the world through dithered pixels — playing games, creating art, writing, and exploring. Seeing these images evokes a rush of nostalgia, simply because they’re dithered.

rswail• 1 year ago

"Design is about constraints" - Charles Eames

The constraints of the original Mac and MacPaint have resulted in an art form specific to the time and place.

layer8• 1 year ago

These really need to be viewed with a CRT renderer IMO, as well as the Amiga art mentioned in this thread. The hard square pixels on the website aren’t quite representative of what these looked like on a contemporary monitor.

leoc• 1 year ago

Up to a point, but the early Macintosh displays were quite crisp and clinical—certainly compared to something like a consumer NTSC or PAL CRT TV—as befitted a platform which was very focussed on WYSIWYG paper-document editing.

card_zero• 1 year ago

Some of them (such as the street scene) wouldn't fit on the monitor and presumably were intended to be printed for viewing.

vman81• 1 year ago

Reminds me of the youtube video where Ahoy recreates one of the classic 4 Byte images from the 80's 4-Byte Burger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4

ekunazanu• 1 year ago

For me, there's a certain aesthetic to 1-bit bayer-dithered images, as well as images with visibly big coloured-halftone-dots, that makes it feel both retro and modern at the same time. I want to call it neo-retro, but I feel like that term already exists.

cubefox• 1 year ago

That street scene is some of the best pixel art I have ever seen.

https://blog.decryption.net.au/images/macpaint/lesson3d.png

marhee• 1 year ago

If you enjoy this art-style, definitely check out the game Return to the Obra Dinn.

Eric_WVGG• 1 year ago

There’s a ditherpunk artist in Moscow named Uno Morales that I’m quite fond of: https://unomoralez.com/

wibbily• 1 year ago

I was just about to post the same link! Found his site today by pure happenstance.

Don't know this guy's technique, but the idea that people were drawing such elaborate pictures on tiny screens - with mice! not even tablets - boggles me. Every pixel a deliberate act.

aresant• 1 year ago

Can’t believe this doesn’t include our friend Pinot who is still churning out unreal MacPaint pixel art

https://www.cultofmac.com/news/pinot-w-ichwandardi-flatiron-...

manoDev• 1 year ago

These seem to be made by artists trained on traditional drawing. All drawings show knowledge of cross-hatching or pointillism, correct use of values, perspective, and so on. That’s why it looks great today, these qualities are independent of how advanced the digital medium of the time was.

akie2• 1 year ago

Look at this one for example - my mind is blown: https://blog.decryption.net.au/images/macpaint/lesson3d.png

How do you even do that? Zoomed out it looks like a nearly photorealistic street scene, zoomed in I just see seemingly meaningless patterns of black and white. Magic. Unbelievable.

bigyabai• 1 year ago

How do you even do that?

Dithering, for one. The parent also suggests pointillism, which was also a popular modern art technique for making detailed portraits using small, low-detail components.

Cthulhu_• 1 year ago

There's a few - including that one - that look like they're photos pulled through a transformation code. I'm probably wrong though - dithering seems to be incredibly difficult to get right, see e.g. https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg136374...

jasonfarnon• 1 year ago

This image in particular made me wonder if there was some type of tracing aid involved. Maybe the dutch-looking street reminded me of Vermeer's method. I wonder what input device they were using? I was using a pretty nice input surface for doing CAD work sometime around 1990-93 on a PC, and we had occasion to lay transparencies on top and trace on them. I don't know if Macs 5 years before that had this type of peripheral. And anyway, there were certainly some special artists I knew of back then who could do this with a mouse and enough time.

time0ut• 1 year ago

This is amazing. Thank you for sharing!

What a nostalgia trip. Reminds me of sitting in the computer lab in the library in my elementary school in 1990. Some days, I'd give anything to go back.

tombert3• 1 year ago

Love the old monochrome Mac game aesthetic. I played a lot of the original MacVenture Deja Vu game as a kid, and always thought that the art had a cool look to it, and as an adult I'm amazed at what they pulled off, despite the limitations.

sircastor• 1 year ago

One of the mild tragedies of my youth is that when we switched from the Macintosh SE/30 to the IIci, my MacPaint art didn't make the transition. My dad told me that the files were incompatible. I don't think that's actually true, but I didn't know enough at that age to be able to question it or even explore it. There are many many creations throughout first half of my life that are lost for a lack of storage space at the time.

As an aside: Do your best to capture at least something in a way that will be preserved.

xattt• 1 year ago

Good thing I backed up my precious memories to Jaz cartridges.

andai• 1 year ago

When I was a kid, I used to think that better tools would automatically make me good at art.

For example, I was making animations with EasyToon, and I only had a mouse, while the really good animators were using graphics tablets.

Clearly, if I bought a tablet, my own animation skills would drastically improve!

I guess I still kinda believe that, when I look at how fancy some of the newer computers are. If only I had one of those, my creativity would be unlimited!

The funny thing is that my fallacy sorta came true: my friend was showing me some insane stuff he rendered on his 5080 with a custom Stable Diffusion...

egypturnash2• 1 year ago

Better tools won't make you better, but they'll get in the way less, would you rather draw with a pencil or a bar of soap? A mouse is more like the latter than the former.

iLoveOncall• 1 year ago

Okay but you will definitely be able to make better art with a graphical tablet. It's near impossible to have enough precision to draw with a mouse, regardless of practice or skill.

_kidlike• 1 year ago

People that can do these drawings would make awesome art for play.date games!!!

brap• 1 year ago

It looks great today, but if you asked someone in the 90s or even 00s they’d probably say it looks like ass. Or, like, totally wack, dude.

We like it today because of the nostalgia/retro factor.

oasisbob• 1 year ago

I dunno - artwork in this style did pretty good on ffffound back in the day. That's at least as early as 2007. I'm sure you could go back further in other forums and find appreciation for the same reason people like it here.

To contrast, a lot of content from clip-art collections at the time looked awful then and didn't age well at all.

whiteboardr• 1 year ago

Love the “apple periferals” truck!

dietrichepp• 1 year ago

Taking this moment to promote 1-bit art! I run a couple accounts which promote 1-bit art and I’m trying to figure out how to expand what artwork is included. These are just personal accounts that retweet art from 1-bit artists on BlueSky and Twitter.

https://bsky.app/profile/1bitdreams.bsky.social

https://x.com/1BitDreams

neel-openai• 1 year ago

this is awesome!

asveikau• 1 year ago

I remember when this style was current, though some of these images are slightly older than I am.

Also, "a door somewhere" reminds me of old album covers. For whatever reason I'm thinking of Lou Reed's "take no prisoners".

encyclic• 1 year ago

Bert Monroy (the 2nd image, of an alleyway) is still quite active as a digital artist: https://www.bertmonroy.com

jamesgill• 1 year ago

I suppose it's just nostalgia, but I get such a warm fuzzy feeling just seeing this art from the 80s. I can remember using tools like MacPaint. It was just such a fun time to be around computers.

gnarbarian2• 1 year ago

Constraints of the medium enhance artwork.

gnarbarian2• 1 year ago

Constraints of the medium enhance the artwork.

cpach• 1 year ago

I wonder if the face icons where intended for the X-Face header.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Face

decryption3• 1 year ago

Did not expect this post to get so popular - I added a bunch more images I found I was saving for a second post on a rainy day, so go back and reload the page for more 1-bit pixel art goodies :-)

BaculumMeumEst• 1 year ago

Why did Denis have to fuck up Jimi's headstock like that

WoodenChair• 1 year ago

If you want to make MacPaint drawings that incorporate your modern photos then I make a program for that. Retro Dither on the Mac App Store dithers and exports photos to MacPaint (wrapped in MacBinary for transport):

https://oaksnow.com/retrodither/

There’s also a chapter in my new book explaining how to write the same program in Python including Atkinson dithering, the MacPaint file format and MacBinary. You can get the code for free and do the conversions yourself without Retro Dither here:

https://github.com/davecom/ComputerScienceFromScratch

The book is here:

https://nostarch.com/computer-science-from-scratch

ltbarcly3• 1 year ago

Not really?

h8ngryDev2• 1 year ago

That hendrix one goes unfathomably hard. crazy how we took art like this for granted back then.

h8ngryDev2• 1 year ago

Hendrx art goes hard. Sad to think we we took for granted art like that back then.

jedimastert• 1 year ago

Semi-related, a fantastic recreation/"digital restoration" of a classic but if pixel art from the Amiga days

https://youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4

gxs• 1 year ago

Wow, at first glance, my initial reaction is that these trigger some sort of nostalgia - they are really comforting in some odd and interesting way

I can think of a few reasons why this may be the case, but I’m looking forward to chewing on it for a bit

mjmsmith• 1 year ago

Zen and the Art of the Macintosh: https://archive.org/details/mac_Zen_the_Art_of_Macintosh1986

Tabular-Iceberg• 1 year ago

This reminds me of the great tragedy of not exposing the Nokia SmartMessage extension to end users. It could have given a new lease of life to grassroots low resolution 1 bit art in the 90s and early 00s in the form of operator logos.

Instead it was gatekept for grifters in order to separate gullible teenagers from their allowance.

p0w3n3d3• 1 year ago

Btw what is current MacPaint successor? Is there any? Do I understand correctly it used to be shipped with the Mac?

Preview is great to some extent and does a lot of useful things for me but it's designed to modify existing images, and I'm still missing a software to draw a square, circle, some text etc.

ethan_smith• 1 year ago

Try Paintbrush (open-source MacPaint-inspired app), Pixelmator Pro (more advanced), Acorn, or even Apple's built-in Preview has basic drawing tools under the markup icon when viewing images.

p0w3n3d3• 1 year ago

Yeah as I said preview covers 99% of my needs but not for graphics from the scratch.

Thank you, will try! I'm kinda missing this ms paint feel on some specific situations

noufalibrahim2• 1 year ago

These look gorgeous. The thing really was a bicycle for the mind.

MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today

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