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

blog.decryption.net.au

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

#21

Post by seabombs »

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.

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

#22

Post by numtel »

reconnecting wrote: post #4

Then we should probably mention http://macpaint.org (From page HTML source) Does anyone even remember why Netscape 4 was bad?

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.

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

#23

Post by encom »

perihelions wrote: post #13
decryption wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.png

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

#24

Post by donkeybeer »

promiseofbeans wrote: post #19

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!

What monitor do you have?

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

#25

Post by ekianjo »

gxd wrote: post #3

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

some better ones here

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

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

#26

Post by lukan »

seabombs wrote: post #21

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 picture…

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.

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

#28

Post by andrepd »

gxd wrote: post #3

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

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

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

#29

Post by zozbot234 »

lukan wrote: post #26
seabombs wrote: post #21

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 picture…

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.

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.)

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

#30

Post by dan-robertson »

gxd wrote: post #3

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

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.
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