He was around 97 years old when his works, described as “a collision of pointillism and 8-Bit art”, gained recognition. Legally blind graphic artist Hal Lasko from Ohio, US, earned the name ‘Pixel Painter’ in the early 2010s for his intricate artworks using MS Paint. However, that’s not to say that trained artists don’t take the software seriously. Compare this to advanced photo-editing programmes of today, such as Photoshop, Illustrator or CorelDRAW, which have complex features like layers, filters, QR code generators and customisable interfaces that are used by visual artists and graphic designers rather than the average Joe. In this way, the rudimentary graphics tool can be viewed as a somewhat democratic platform where one could produce art with no real training. “If innovation and technical elegance were the only standards of a medium’s historical or cultural merit, there would not be much to say about MS Paint,” adds Davison. “MS Paint has remained comparatively familiar and accessible since its initial incarnation in 1985.” If anything, MS Paint was a little too simple. It was based on the concept of a bitmap rather than “geometrically defined objects” and later incarnations haven’t really strayed from this basic concept, explains Davison. It had a graspable interface unlike other graphic programs at the time that used a language of technology that only engineers would understand. It was just so plainly simply that anyone could use it. The teacher taught us how to launch the software and the first thing I did was colour the entire background black and then turn it into a chessboard with the help of an eraser tool.” Kriti Garg, a 24-year-old artist and photographer based in New Delhi, recalls, “I first used MS Paint in second grade in my Computer Science class. It’s no surprise that this was a canvas upon which memes still used today, like Rage Face and Dolan Duck, were created too. Gone were the bitmapped checkerboard patterns of Windows Paint – replaced with hues produced by mixing 256 values each of red, green, and blue.”įor many urban Indians growing up in the ’90s, Microsoft Paintbrush was the go-to for basic cut-copy-paste jobs, adding texts, creating funny doodles, testing their handwriting using a mouse, creating portraits of their favourite superhero. The largest change, however, was that the program now worked with color. The shape tools fell from 12 to 8, and the bezier curve tool now required two control points (making ‘S’ curves possible). The ‘brush’ tool remained, the ‘pencil’ disappeared, the ‘paint can’ became a ‘paint roller’. And so it was that Microsoft Paintbrush became virtually every urban Indian child’s first digital painting canvas.Īlso read: Planet M - brand that changed how Indians experienced music in new millenniumĭavison writes on the changes from the original: “The tool palette moved to the left edge of the screen, and the color palette stretched across the bottom. Then, before the turn of the millennium, internet, email services and messenger services had also taken root, and Indian children, were, for the first time, truly growing up with computers. By the mid-90s, economic reforms had been ushered in and households across India had slowly started to acquire basic desktops.
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