miss paint
yet another existentialist crisis
Starting around November of last year or so I started to draw and paint in MS paint. Why? Idk. I have a vague recollection of being inundated with bad arguments about if “digital art is real art” and being forced to sit through the subsequent embarassing explanation of “you have so many tools at your disposal when you work in Photoshop, that’s basically cheating.” I learned a valuable lesson: stop having conversations with people who think in binary terms of “real art” and “not real art.” But that’s a whole other can of worms I’m not about to open in this post about MS Paint.
My undercooked brain couldn’t shake this desire to prove that digital tools are just tools and art is not defined by the medium it was made. (Insider note: it was an intrusive thought and I’m pretty sure the resulting number of pieces I made in MS Paint were a result of compulsive behavior. Like, how does drawing in MS Paint prove to anyone that using less Photoshop keystrokes would make it “realer”? Really off the mark there.) Somehow someway I decided I’ll just start making pieces in MS Paint. Not just pieces. But like, whole ass paintings.
A couple of things I’ve learned when I opened up MS Paint:
MS Paint has changed. Holy shit. There are layers. They have different brushes. You can change the size of the pencil (no longer just 4 preset squares to choose from). But to prove to my soup brain, I decided I will only stick with the classic pencil tool. That and the bucket tool. Maybe the marquee tool if I’m feeling generous. And hand selecting colors by sliding things around. That’ll show them.
MS Paint still has so many limitations. You cannot change the opacity on layers. The resolution only goes so high, like 96 dpi on certain screens. Shrinking/expanding things is a nightmare. Any and all perks that we have grown accustom to in more advanced painting programs is gone. No adjustments, no blending properties, no filters. I would argue it’s as bare-minimum as it gets but some people seem to get off on being contrarian. There is no winning against haters.
As it turns out, if you have experience creating art, you can make art literally fucking anywhere. You can make good and bad art with the world’s fanciest programs or the worst programs. You can make good and bad art with sticks and rocks. You can make art with anything. What even is art, if not the relationship an object or phenomenon has with an observer. An object can become art if we just want it to be. When I look at a cloud, a vaporous mass of water particles, I know it is nothing more than just the air pressure (plus other science I forgot about) that made it. But I saw it as art, and that cloud became art.
Of course, I knew this. I knew this all along. Why the fuck did I spent so many hours sliding a dot around to get the colors I wanted? Why didn’t I just shrug at those annoying snobs and just continue painting in a program that doesn’t hate me? If I have to be a little bit introspective, it’s because I found the notion there there is such a thing as “real art” disgusting. (Why it manifested as MS paint drawings is beyond me.) Art evolves like how a virus evolves- fast and weird, sometimes in ways we don’t want it to go. It keeps changing and morphing depending on the time and place it is created. Anyone who argues that art is dead, and “realer” art existed “back then”, especially the ones who bemoan the invention of the camera, or hate brutalism, or only give a shit about the ones hanging in museums and expensive galleries, are kinda sorta purists who probably think colonialism is a good thing. Oh fuck, the can is open and the worms are everywhere.
Another thing I learned is that limitations are nice sometimes.
MS Paint doesn’t have a great save function. If you are to save whatever you made, it will automatically deep fry that image and you will be left with the gross compression lossy-ness typical of low-res JPEGs. Because of this, I opted to just make sure whatever I drew or painted was done by the time I had to close the program. I also have a life (shocking) so I capped it off at 2 hours. Forcing myself to live with loose unfinished pieces and having the mistakes burn my eyeballs.
After that brief stint painting on MS Paint, I decided to pivot a bit. Instead of painting from still frames, I challenged myself to make illustrations. It was a nice step away from the usual art programs. I’ve spent over a decade making work in Photoshop and CSP. My entire livelihood depended on me mastering some form of this program and creating work that was professional and usable. Even when I tried to make work that was “for me” and “for fun” I found myself stressing out over drawing and composition flaws and would spend hours upon hours trying to fix these problems. With Photoshop, it was incredibly easy. I could make 5 variations of a drawing within 10 minutes. MS Paint made that incredibly hard.
In a way MS Paint relieved me of some of my perfectionist tendencies. Even though I started off trying to prove something, I came to enjoy and appreciate the art of disappointing myself.
Anyway yea all of that is to say: ms paint is fun you should try it. Ok thanks for reading this bye !!!
Loveed following along this journey of exploration and seeing where it took you, wow! 2 hour MS Paint illos?! Truly proving that digital tools are just tools and you can make art with literally anything!!!
So fucking good