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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

#201

Post by giraffe_lady »

wileydragonfly wrote: post #182
giraffe_lady wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> remember that the great classical composers were the rock stars of their day. I don't have a source for this but I hear it a lot and I strongly suspect it is a historiographical myth. Pretty much only a very small minority urban (relative) elite had access to live professionally performed classical music during most periods when it was being composed. This is also the group whose writings form most of our current k…

What does this hair split accomplish? We have to settle on something.

Why? Says who? Historians find that our understanding of the past is never complete, and always open to reevaluation based on new information or techniques. I agree with them.

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

#202

Post by akie »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #172
akie wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 periph…

Definitely not a Dutch street. More likely a German, Austrian/Swiss, or Alsatian (France) one. Those kind of half-timbered houses are extremely uncommon in the Netherlands.

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

#203

Post by p0w3n3d »

ethan_smith wrote: post #196
p0w3n3d wrote: post #191

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.

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

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

#204

Post by st_phan »

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…

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.

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

#205

Post by tumnus »

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.

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.

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

#206

Post by tonijn »

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…

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

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

#207

Post by briangriffinfan »

sgt wrote: post #41
Dante690 wrote: post #37

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?

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

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.

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

#209

Post by Lammy »

dehrmann wrote: post #129
AndrewStephens wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Rockstar already did it in Bully https://bully.fandom.com/wiki/Lawn_Mowing

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

#210

Post by niedzielski »

st_phan wrote: post #204
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…

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.

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