MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
(blog.decryption.net.au)974 points by decryption 2 days ago
974 points by decryption 2 days 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.
Switched-on Bach is a revelation in part because the synth bass tones are more focused, distinct, and identifiable than when the same notes are played on acoustic instruments — allowing you to hear harmonic interplay which I believe is closer to what Bach heard in his head.
But here are lots of Bach synth albums and only Wendy Carlos’ work has the taste and obsessive fidelity to the original compositions to allow those ideas to come through. Most synth Bach falls into the trap of being idiomatic synth rather than idiomatic Bach, akin to playing Bach on the piano without considering how it would have sounded on the harpsichord.
I really like the 2 Bach synth albums by Marco Rosano.
Awesome, thanks. Had an inkling whatever Spotify came up with wasn’t right—thank you TIA for Wendy Carlos’s 1968 original!:
https://archive.org/details/wendy-carlos-witched-on-bach
(have to donate to Internet Archive again now…) anyway Wiki says this album essentially brought the Moog/synths from experimental to popular music. In a lovely fashion, my ears do say.
You should take a listen to Tomita as well then! There is so much beautiful music in the world
This reminds me of how the pixel version of Chicago font looks great but the vector version doesn't.
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.
Western classical music had a strong tradition of taking advantage of cutting edge technological advances, especially in metallurgy but also advanced woodworking techniques like lamination making large soundboards possible and pushing the bounds of acoustic amplification.
It wasn't until I think around the advent of recorded music and electric amplification that it settled into a fairly stable set of instruments & sounds produced by them.
Understanding this point about cave paintings is crucial to not being a human piece of garbage.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I think most indie developers choose pixel art (and low-poly 3D) today because they still can’t produce high-quality high-detail art, and high-quality pixel art is prettier than low-quality high-detail art.
It’s still a case where the developer can’t truly express their vision, but they can express it behind a filter, in this case pixelation, that makes our brains charitably fill in the missing details.
Although I’m sure for some games it is part of their vision, because there’s something intrinsically pretty about pixel art and low-poly 3D. Likewise there are 2D games like Cuphead that emulate “cartoon” style, and 3D games like Guilty Gear that emulate 2D anime; those are much harder than making a 2D or 3D game with traditional modern graphics.
Right. This is kind of what I’m talking about. Someone choosing pixel art today is making a choice; they have a vision. 40 years ago, they were limited by the system. The choice was largely made for them.
Old video games come to mind. The box art would be drastically different than the look of the game. The box art was the vision, the game was what they ended up with after compromises due to the hardware of the day. I think it’s only been in the last decade or so that some game makers have truly been able to realize the visions they had 40 years ago.
I think of the box art and physical manual of a video game like Diablo from 1996, compared to the game itself. The manual had several detailed drawings of monsters and otherworldly creatures with a very "evil" look, but the game itself they were represented as blocky sprites with fairly comical movement, as characters moved on a isometric chessboard-style grid, with abrupt turns and limited speed. Ultimately the gameplay is what mattered, the box art, in-game music and sound effects all created an atmosphere that wouldn't have been as immersive with just graphics.
A point of comparison would be to the game Quake, which came out the same year, and whose graphics felt light years ahead . But Quake mostly became a multiplayer hit, as the single-player story and overall atmosphere weren't very compelling.
Maybe recency bias cause I’m playing it right now, but Breath of the Wild comes to mind
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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:
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:
There was an article posted here not too long about with a similar sentiment about the NEC PC-98
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.
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.
Using colour cycling to achieve animation-like effects is so hot.
Can't mention that without linking the master of the effect
http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ (hit "Show Options")
Loved this dive on one such Deluxe Paint piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4
some better ones here
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.
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.
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.
They could have been cleaning up a scan of a photo, ThunderScan came out real early in the Mac's life.
Scanned drawing + painting over it with dither patterns is an option too.
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...
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-...
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.
Similarly, some cave paintings still look awesome.
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.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
Then we should probably mention
(From page HTML source) <!-- ******** HELLO OLD COMPUTER USERS ******** --> <!-- This site is designed to be viewable at 640x480 resolution or higher in any color mode in Netscape/IE 3 or any better browser, so if you're using an LC III or something, you're welcome. In fact, I really hope you are using such a machine, because limiting the site to this level of simplicity wouldn't be worth it unless someone is. Please let me know if you are using an old computer to visit the site so I know it is worth it to someone to maintain this compatibility. I do apologize for the one javascript error that you may get on each page load, but I don't expect it to cause any crashes. The major exception to all of this is Netscape 4. That thing sucks. -->
Does anyone even remember why Netscape 4 was bad?
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.
Indeed, browsers learned how to hurt people from their earliest days.
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...
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.
True, Winamp 2 was much solid. Unless I'm mistaken Winamp 3 introduce skins and after absolute madness starts.
> 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.
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.
You're not wrong. IE seemed very much designed around the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish concept. It made it incredibly difficult to write cross-browser CSS.
> I'm jealous of your memory capabilities,
Thanks. Learning web development back then left some deep scars and lasting lessons. I can no longer imagine all the other stuff I haven't retained because I remember stupid browser quirks from nearly three decades ago.
Getting many designs working consistently between IE and Netscape was impossible. The 640px wide left-aligned table layout was popular for years because it was the easiest common denominator that looked acceptable in both browsers.
When back to this time the web was mostly a pain, especially for developers, there was also some magic.
Take for example VRML, particularly VRML 2.0. I don't remember the software name, but there was a chat system within a virtual world, perhaps running in a browser (1).
1. https://csdl-images.ieeecomputer.org/mags/cg/1999/02/figures...
There was problem with styles and tables.
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.
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...
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)
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.
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.
“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.
There’s a ditherpunk artist in Moscow named Uno Morales that I’m quite fond of: https://unomoralez.com/
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.
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.
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.
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!
This was on an OLED Samsung phone, screen running at 120Hz
Yes, I asked because I got curious about the effect and opened the link to see it but didn't notice it on mine, so I figured it must be specific to your display.
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
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?
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...
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.
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.
These look gorgeous. The thing really was a bicycle for the mind.
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.
Semi-related, a fantastic recreation/"digital restoration" of a classic but if pixel art from the Amiga days
I think the .png images on this website are larger than the uncompressed originals (1-bit depth, 1 bit per pixel).
Yep, I upscaled them by 400% so they’re easier to view on modern displays.
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.
The PNG files seem to be very poorly compressed.
$ oxipng -o max --strip all -avZ --fast acius.png
Processing: acius.png
2304x2880 pixels, PNG format
8-bit Indexed (2 colors), non-interlaced
IDAT size = 84251 bytes
File size = 84326 bytes
Transformed image to 1-bit Indexed (2 colors), non-interlaced
Trying filter None with zopfli, zi = 15
Found better result:
zopfli, zi = 15, f = None
IDAT size = 24466 bytes (59785 bytes decrease)
file size = 24541 bytes (59785 bytes = 70.90% decrease)
24541 bytes (70.90% smaller): acius.pngI wonder if the face icons where intended for the X-Face header.
Bert Monroy (the 2nd image, of an alleyway) is still quite active as a digital artist: https://www.bertmonroy.com
That street scene is some of the best pixel art I have ever seen.
Why did Denis have to fuck up Jimi's headstock like that
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.
rembrandt paintings from the 17th century still look great today
The UXN people did similart art too: https://xxiivv.com
Zen and the Art of the Macintosh: https://archive.org/details/mac_Zen_the_Art_of_Macintosh1986
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.
Yes - seemed correct.
James Leftwich: http://www.macpaint.org/jimwich.html
Bert Monroy: https://www.bertmonroy.com/
Laurence Gartel: https://digitalartmuseum.org/gartel/bw.html
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.