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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.

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

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.

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

Then we should probably mention

http://macpaint.org

(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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not really?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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!

Similarly, some cave paintings still look awesome.

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

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Constraints of the medium enhance the artwork.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

rembrandt paintings from the 17th century still look great today

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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".

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...

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 :-)

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.

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

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

so does roman mosaics :-)

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-...

Constraints of the medium enhance artwork.

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.

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.

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.

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.

this is awesome!

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

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

"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.

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

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

Love the “apple periferals” truck!

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.