A 97-Year-Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows ’95

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/07/the-pixel-painter-a-97-year-old-man-who-paints-using-microsoft-paint-from-windows-95/

by tvladeck • 13 years ago

596 110 13 years ago

thisiscolossal.com

unimpressive2• 13 years ago

This story illustrates two things that invalidate a lot of excuses.

1. It's probably not too late to start a new skill.

2. For digital drawing/painting in particular, the tools probably aren't as important as most people think. (Though to say they're not important would be lying. Bad tools shorten your life.)

toble• 13 years ago

Older tools can be liberating because you have to work within their modest set of features. Choice isn't always a good thing etc.

deadfall• 13 years ago

This is true. I am not expert in PS, so when I use it I basically only use the basic tools that MS paint provide. Unless I use the auto blend feature which is a fantastic.

I think some of this art would be great backgrounds for indie pixel games.

woofyman• 13 years ago

Having a limited set of tools forces me to be more creative. When I only had simple monophonic synthesizers, the results were much better than with the nearly unlimited sounds at my disposal now.

chestnut-tree• 13 years ago

"For digital drawing/painting in particular, the tools probably aren't as important as most people think"

I agree, there's a lot of longevity and capability in older software. Watching this MS Paint video makes me realise we're too quick to dismiss software as outdated or inadequate.

This story reminded me of another artist: an illustrator called Bob Staake who uses Photoshop 3 and a mouse to create his illustrations. He has a series of short videos on his website showing his process

http://www.bobstaake.com/pixfix/films.shtml

lettergram• 13 years ago

I'm impressed.

Lazaro4100• 13 years ago

I have to admit that the video made me tear. As a graphic artist myself, this man is my ultimate hero!

peterkelly• 13 years ago

Wow!

Just goes to show it's not about what tool you use, it's about your skills and what you can do with it.

We would do well to remember this in all the programming language debates we like to have here.

atondwal• 13 years ago

Unless it's about text editors. Then you can't get _anything_ done if you don't use ed.

jackschultz• 13 years ago

I might even go so far as saying that is isn't about the tool, it's about the enjoyment you get from it. Quality should be important only if it's important to you. For most people it is, but if you enjoy doing something, it shouldn't matter what the quality is.

zw1234563• 13 years ago

I agree, I just posted the same sentiment, sorry for being redundant.

jberryman• 13 years ago

What I thought of was about the importance of process and the notion of a medium. Limitations are essential to creativity. That's why I think talking about "digital photography" as a medium is nonsense, and why I think instagram should be taken seriously.

I'm not sure how I think that relates to what programmers do.

ddeck• 13 years ago

Absolutely. Further highlighted by the link at the end of the story to a page on Tatsuo Horiuchi, who creates his artwork with.....Excel!

http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2013/05/28/tatsuo-horiuchi-excel...

the_cat_kittles• 13 years ago

agreed, but it might also be a testament to how good a tool ms paint is

coldcode• 13 years ago

I don't care what some fancy digital artist complains about above. It's beautiful. You try painting something beautiful with 90% of your vision gone. I imagine you probably dislike Michelangelo's work since he didn't use Photoshop either.

zw1234563• 13 years ago

Whether you are using ancient tools like brushes and oil, or the most cutting edge paint program out there or MS Paint, or whatever, it is the artist's skill that matters.

iopq• 13 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb3A1TdqXug this one is more impressive to me than his artwork

jussij2• 13 years ago

That link is pretty darn good, but don't forget the 97 year old guy is nearly blind.

primelens• 13 years ago

I agree that it shows awesome mastery of paint, but the 97 year gentleman is making his own art - he just uses paint to do it.

dmotles• 13 years ago

Yay :) The video made me very happy. Thanks for sharing.

cjh_• 13 years ago

Truly stunning.

cdhack2• 13 years ago

Sometimes old tools are better, they have a stable operation and a lower CPU and memory usage. Maybe some famous tools like Photoshop should review their products carefully, they do have abundant functions, but to a certain extent, are they useful or practical for most common users?

Best wishes to this great man.

unimpressive2• 13 years ago

are they useful or practical for most common users?

Photoshop purchased legitimately is extremely expensive, it's not targeted at common users.

GuiA2• 13 years ago

Photoshop Elements is (somewhat) cheap, targeted at the everyman, and suffers from those problems though.

cdhack2• 13 years ago

It's not wise to simply judge a product's user by its price. MS Office professional is expensive, most users are still ordinary people.

bane• 13 years ago

A quote I once heard but can't remember the attribution "you don't need better tools, you need to do better with the tools you have"

also http://readwrite.com/2013/06/11/excel-is-an-art-form-these-b...

zw1234563• 13 years ago

When I was growing up in Oregon, the dude that was the awesomest best skiier, was the guy wearing Levi's and really shitty skis. Some things never change.

sramsay• 13 years ago

I'm a pretty good (acoustic) guitarist, and I swear it's because the guitar I began with probably should have been used as kindling. The action sucked, so I developed excellent finger strength. The poor tension made it really easy to choke a string, so I developed incredible accuracy. It was really "buzzy," so I learned complicated finger-style patterns just so it wouldn't sound so bad when I played.

The first time I got my hands on a real guitar, I sounded like Andres Segovia. :)

I won't say that I never tried to blame my tools after that, but I do often manage to remind myself that when things are going wrong it's probably not the fault of the knife, hammer, programming language . . .

alan_cx• 13 years ago

Reminds me of Seasick Steve. He plays a guitar with 3 strings missing. Sounds better than most with all 6.

phektus• 13 years ago

I fell in love with computers during high school, where my teacher would allow me to play pokemon via gba rom in exchange for creating our school brochures and flyers using MSPaint. I have the honor of making the first soft version of our school logo, which the school only have in paper back then. Surprisingly, I didn't learn Photoshop in college and just went full speed to programming, which I hated in high school as it was taught using Visual Basic.

fear91• 13 years ago

It's always amazing to hear senile (but still sharp) people talk.

97 years of existence must teach a lot about life and what is really important.

I wonder what could be achieved in one particular field of expertise if you devoted all that time to it. It's over 500,000 hours of possible learning ( for a 90 year old ). Some say that 10,000 hours is what takes to gain mastery ( I know this is controversial ).

I like to imagine myself mysteriously falling into some other dimension where I am forced to live for 1000000 years and practice one craft, then returning and comparing my skills to those who had only one short life :) It helps to push the boundary of what seems "impossible" a little bit more.

altrego99• 13 years ago

Starting at 40-50, each decade you loose 2-3% of your neurons. At 90, by that calculation - unless things accelerate further - you'd loose 12% of your neurons. I hope I remain still as sharp when I reach my 90s.

Hello71• 13 years ago

http://www.xkcd.com/505/

photorized• 13 years ago

That was beautiful.

freework• 13 years ago

If there is such a thing as a software hall of fame, MSPaint deserves to be in the inaugural class. Microsoft has written some real crap over the years, but MSPaint is no one of them. Its a shame that Microsoft seems to have left MSPaint behind after XP. I've tried all the open source MSPaint alternatives, and none of them even come close to being as good as MSPaint. Its like the "Super Mario Bros" of desktop software.

edlinfan• 13 years ago

I have copied mspaint.exe from a WinXP machine. It doesn't seem to have any prerequisites, and still works fine!

yuhong• 13 years ago

Win8 still have it.

GuiA2• 13 years ago

It does have the ribbon interface though, right? Sure, it's still mostly there- but what made the original so great was its straightforward interface. I find the ribbon interface takes that away.

jussij2• 13 years ago

It's there on Windows 7. Just select the Windows Start button, type in paint and hit return.

deepblueq• 13 years ago

It's not nearly as nice an interface, though.

oacgnol• 13 years ago

Growing up before I knew anything about computers I always asked my parents if I could play on the home PC, which really equated to MSPaint time.

Others might have started off with tinkering with BASIC and whatnot but I think I'm fortunate enough that it turned out to be my gateway drug into computers anyways.

ultimoo• 13 years ago

Back in 1995 when I was about 9 my parents paid a princely sum of Rs. 500 to enroll me for 4 classes of MSPaint spread out over 1 month at a local school that had secured two personal computers with color monitors back in India. So, I guess MSPaint was my gateway drug too :-) [For comparison, I think a loaf of bread in India that time used to cost about Rs. 5.]

mgurlitz• 13 years ago

The original mspaint.exe has survived all these years by running hassle-free on Wine and on new editions of Windows. But I wouldn't say MS abandoned Paint: Win8's "Fresh Paint" is one of the coolest touch-based apps out there: http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2012/11/15/behind-th...

kerbs• 13 years ago

Nothing gives me more rage than opening "other" drawing software, selecting the "paint bucket", and clicking anywhere inside an enclosed shape and not seeing it fill with the color I selected.

Layers, vectors. Give me break. MS Paint was more intuitive in the 90's than any software to date.

nickpinkston• 13 years ago

Hear, hear! I'm not sure why it wasn't copied more widely. Hell, I'm using screenshots / PDFs of my Keynote presentations instead of heavy-weight vector graphics programs.

w0utert• 13 years ago

You could argue MS Paint was about as intuitive as the geoPaint application in GEOS on the C64 [1], which has an almost identical feature set and user interface as MS Paint.

I don't really understand why anyone in their right mind would have anything positive to say about MS Paint except that it is ubiquitous, and they remember having fun with it when they were still a kid. It's really a pretty lousy program, more like what you expect from a code sample shipped with a compiler.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_%288-bit_operating_system%...

stiff3• 13 years ago

You must be kidding. It's a solid step back from Sketchpad developed in 1963:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuKREmsiD9o

Apple had an almost identical drawing program in the early MacOS version:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPaint

There were tens of better drawing programs meanwhile, for example I remember being able to do animations as a 5 year old kid using the fantastic Fanta Vision program under MS DOS (pity the editing isn't shown in the video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjj7Yf3JRvE http://www.old-games.com/download/5732/fanta-vision

Unfortunately the leading open source painting programs are remarkably uninspired, interfaces of Gimp and Inkscape are truly a mess, but then artists are hardly Linux users. On OSX there are a lot of great painting programs, for example:

http://www.artrage.com/artrage-4-samples.html

Sprint• 13 years ago

Try Mypaint or Krita as alternatives to Gimp and please do not bad-mouth FOSS painting tools if you do not know them.

ancarda2• 13 years ago

Apple had an almost identical drawing program in the early MacOS version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacPaint

Because Bill Gates wrote MacPaint. When Windows was in development, he likely wrote MSPaint, or at-least got a developer to make it similar.

vidarh4• 13 years ago

MsPaint only receives that kind of response from people because it was near universally available for a lot of people.

Deluxe Paint is still my favourite, but there's a long list of much better paint programs for the Amiga too, but the vast majority of people who have used MS Paint have never seen any of them.

_b8r0• 13 years ago

Deluxe Paint II was lightyears ahead of MS Paint, back in the 80s.

mda• 13 years ago

Absolutely, for this type of work Deluxe paint would make him more productive because of much better zoom tools and palette management.

keithpeter2• 13 years ago

When Windows 95 first came out, it came with a little tutorial booklet by Microsoft with some activities based on Paint, Wordpad &c to show off the desktop tools. I used that booklet to walk students through the new UI, and we always had a lot of fun with Paint, especially when the College obtained a colour printer. Oddly enough, I used the structure of that tutorial - the idea of a walk-through demonstrating features of a default install - when I knocked up a bit of a tutorial for Ubuntu Unity 2d[1]

This splendid gentleman's work appears to be constructed from geometrical shapes plus some pixel level editing. His professional background would have required a very good eye and patience (my partner Ruth can remember pre-computer typography, layout and film-setting having trained as a graphic artist).

I suspect that his use case could be met using mtPaint, a free/libre painting program which allows pixel level editing without palette dithering &c. and which has the geometrical shape tool along with the ability to change what happens when you overlap the shapes. mtPaint can work with 8 bit palettes. Jason Rohrer uses mtPaint for his screens in the 8 bit games he produces [2]. I think the point of this gentleman's work is precisely its pixellated nature and use of primary-ish flat colours.

My takeaway from this thread on HN is that high quality work can come from very simple tools.

[1] http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/files/unity2dguide.pdf

[2] http://jason.rohrer.usesthis.com/

Tmmrn• 13 years ago

I've tried all the open source MSPaint alternatives, and none of them even come close to being as good as MSPaint.

KDE's kolourpaint is basically a clone with more features: http://kolourpaint.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

Pinta has this layer idea more prominent, but it can still be used as simple as you want: http://pinta-project.com/

mtpaint has a lot more features than ms paint. The gui is unintuitive, but if you get used to it I'm sure it's just as easy: http://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/

Tloewald3• 13 years ago

This is hilarious. Not only is MSPaint awful by today's standards, it was awful when it shipped. It was grossly inferior to paint software written for the Mac, Amiga, and DOS.

nutmeg• 13 years ago

My daughter actually asked me to install the XP version of MSPaint when she got a new laptop with Windows 7.

runjake• 13 years ago

Paint.NET seems like it should come close to being as good as MSPaint and it was originally developed to be its (spiritual) successor by interns at Microsoft.

http://getpaint.net

devindotcom• 13 years ago

Fantastic app. Routinely a reference point for me when I am talking about excellent free software. Wish there was something nearly as good for OS X but almost everything on Mac is terrible and costs good money.

mey• 13 years ago

If you are looking for a current good alternative to MSPaint that is easy to use, I suggest http://www.getpaint.net/. Free, but not OSS.

jrarredondo• 13 years ago

After a while, most HN posts just fade away in my memory.

I will remember this one forever.

beforebeta• 13 years ago

I read this and I think - what would the creator of MS Paint think if he read this story. As a developer and a creator, if I would ever read a story like this, about a product that I had created, I would think my life to be complete. Stories like this inspire me to keep stretching the boundary of what is possible and to keep creating...

D9u• 13 years ago

Windows "Paintbrush" was the application that piqued my interest in computers back in 1991. My artistic skills are definitely less than acceptable, and my inability to color within the lines in my grand-children's coloring books is proof. But with "pbrush.exe" I was ushered into an entirely new realm where even I could draw a straight line, or perfect spheres and polygons.

However, none of my art work ever looked as awesome as that produced by Mr Lasko.

DigitalSea• 13 years ago

In an age of Photoshop and Illustrator this guy is drawing in an archaic painting program I used when I was in single digits and producing some awesome results.

I don't care whether or not you think MsPaint is lame, old or other debatable points about it, you can't argue this piece in particular 'Rambo' is awesome: http://hallasko.com/collections/prints/products/rambo

Being creative has nothing to do with what tools you use at the end of the day. People were creative long before the digital age and this guy has proven you don't need the latest, greatest or most expensive tools to produce a piece of art. Just an idea and any means to explore that idea is all you need.

This is nothing short of inspiring to me. Probably one of the most positive and inspiring things I've seen on HN in a long time.

ivanbrussik• 13 years ago

this man is inspiring, what a beautiful story

i love MS Paint - I work in a large marketing firm and use it everyday sometimes on advertisements that a million people see

kabisote• 13 years ago

Two statements from Grandpa that made an impact on me: "I got a lot of patience. That's what you really need anyway." and "When I worked I always had to do something to please the client. Now I can do whatever I want."

stephth• 13 years ago

Has anyone found any of his paintings in native resolution? I'd agree if you said that was a requirement to fully appreciate pixel art.

BasilAwad• 13 years ago

This is a great story. These are also the type of stories that should be shared to build bridges between different cultures and communities. The elderly are our nation's treasure.

logn• 13 years ago

They are. And soon we'll be them. I hope my NES works when I'm 90. And I'm hoping they still have a copy of Notepad and javac.exe around for me.

semicolondev• 13 years ago

I use Paint:

1)when I'm bored. http://www.flickr.com/photos/bhu1st/4911339994/

2)when I've to crop/edit quick screenshots

3) while teaching students about web design process (I do design/prototype quick web page layouts using paint).

4)meme generator ! Stitch images quickly to share it online.

While switching to Linux or other OS I sometime unknowingly try to hit win-r->mspaint.

sp332• 13 years ago

The title reminded me of "Hyperbole and a Half" http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/11/dogs-dont-unde... which manages to fit some pretty complex emotional expressions into mspaint-based stick figures.

japt• 13 years ago

it's not the tool it's how you use it

alinspired• 13 years ago

This should be called "A 97-Year-Old Man Who Draws".. MAN capitalized

emitstop• 13 years ago

This is one of the most inspiring videos I've had the pleasure of watching. This gives me hope for when (if) I become an old man myself. I do a lot of creative work, and if I ever lost the ability to do or experience those things. It'd just be devastating. Time goes by so quick.

baumgarn• 13 years ago

Nice guy and paintings. Still, I am fed up with the obtrusive "pitch" narrative of these kind of videos. If the resulting sentiment is mainly due to technical style, what does that say about your real values?

calandoa• 13 years ago

Who DARE challenge the power of MS Paint?

http://www.elftor.com/elftor.php?number=112

keepingcom• 13 years ago

No layers... wow. I wish I still had win 95 to try to draw without any layer

mkr-hn2• 13 years ago

You can use GIMP or Photoshop without adding layers.

mokash• 13 years ago

We spend so much time discussing to death the tools we use, time which should be spent using them instead. This man just got on with it.

Roonerelli• 13 years ago

On a similar note, you can send in suggestions to this guy and he'll draw them in MS-Paint

http://jimllpaintit.tumblr.com/

There are a lot of really funny ones in there

Toenex• 13 years ago

Truly a beautiful thing.

koft• 13 years ago

kool

akadien• 13 years ago

This is cool. It demonstrates that imagination is more important than tools. I'm going to code in Notepad.exe today as a show of support.

enemtin• 13 years ago

MS Paint. What a classic.

hablahaha• 13 years ago

Prints! Shut up and take my money! Oh, that's a lot of money...

xwowsersx• 13 years ago

Just came here to say this was awesome. Really moving. Inspired by how full of life Hal seems even at his advanced age. Also, really nice to see technology enhance someone's life in such a wholesome, simple way.

ftwinnovations• 13 years ago

This was so inspirational and amazing that I purchased two prints for my office.

Nice work grandpa!

A 97-Year-Old Man Who Draws Using Microsoft Paint from Windows ’95

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