5/25/2005: Venice rendered in MS Paint

This is, in one sense, a masterpiece.

It doesn't tell us anything new about Venice, but what it says about ourselves and our tools is something else.

Using modern-day tools, a digital artist can create just about anything the mind can imagine. Microsoft Paint program, however, is not one such tool; it's the simplest of drawing tools. Imagine a mechanic with a full drawer of modern tools in all sizes, hydraulic lift, etc. next to a mechanic with one $5 wrench and one $5 screwdriver: that's roughly the difference between Adobe suite of tools (Illustrator, Photoshop, etc) and little old MS Paint.

And yet it did inspire one gentleman to produce an image of Venice. Producing this image took him 500 hours.

"with alittle photophop bluring", he points out in his original post. (Sure, blur is *hard*; it would probably take another 300 hours to apply a blur by hand in Paint, versus three minutes in Photoshop.)

that is incredible... and truly interesting art. i like it- the fact that someone has pored over it for 500 hours makes it 54938 times better ... wierd isn't it

I saw this a couple days ago, and I was amazed. MS Paint has a full palette of colors, but it is very limited in tools and effects. A good analogy would be to imagine that this is a painting where only one tiny brush was used, and the image was slowly constructed one tiny stroke at a time. No doubt the sky and the water reflections are all from the Photoshop touchup, as well as the lens flares on the lamps.

Of course, years ago we were creating some pretty pictures with our Amiga-based Deluxe Paint software, and it was about as powerful as MS Paint is now. But those images, while just as pretty, were not to this scale. This image speaks as much about the artist's patience as it does his/her skill.

hot_pastrami wrote:

No doubt the sky and the water reflections are all from the Photoshop touchup, as well as the lens flares on the lamps.

I don't think so, they were probably in the picture he was basing this off of.

Happy Monkey wrote:

I don't think so, they were probably in the picture he was basing this off of.

Maybe the lens flares were done by hand, but I betcha the blurring on the water reflections and sky are both Photoshop. He admits to some Photoshop "blurring," and frankly if he did that sky by hand in MS Paint, he'd have spent more than the claimed 500 hours on this thing.

The water reflections could be hand-blurred, but if he was planning to do some blurring in Photoshop anyway, why bother? Of course, as beautiful as this image is, it certainly wasn't driven by efficiency.

The guy who did this belongs to a private community I'm a member of. It was few weeks ago now but if I remember correctly the reflections were done in paint and blurred a little in PS. Look closely there was very, very little bluring done apart from the sky.

hot_pastrami wrote:

Maybe the lens flares were done by hand, but I betcha the blurring on the water reflections and sky are both Photoshop.

Ah, just the blurring. Yeah. He drew in the sky and the reflections using paint, and then blurred them with PS.

I think there's more interesting here than just the difficulty of creating this work in MSPaint, although the difficulty was clearly very high. The guy says he did it this way because he didn't know any graphic software.

I think it would have taken less than 500 hours to learn how to use graphic software. But hey, that's just me. :-)

BTW, reminds me of this one: http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=1176

Probably like most painting the object is not to acquire the painting but the relaxation, diversion, satisfaction. You don't have to know lots of software to get those.
I wonder if during the course of this or the previous painting, he accidentally deleted or forgot to save the current session? Or if he had a crash? :eek:

My thoughts:

* It is quite beautiful.
* It is impressive that he did w/ MS Paint.
* Oops, he didn't use MS Paint, he used pshop for the parts that he needed pshop for......!!$?????!!!
* This is exactly like the thread the other week: look! Artist lives in tree nest in city forgoing all communication...... EXCEPT THE COMMUNICATION HE HAS OVER HIS TEXT MESSAGES.... which totally null and voids the whole "non communication" thing.

The 'impression' factor on this went from 9/10 down to 2/10 in one sentence flat.

He used paint except for where it was hard then used pshop and wants to glorify the fact that he did it in paint....WTF!!!!

-mike

mlandman wrote:

My thoughts:

* It is quite beautiful.
* It is impressive that he did w/ MS Paint.
* Oops, he didn't use MS Paint, he used pshop for the parts that he needed pshop for......!!$?????!!!
* This is exactly like the thread the other week: look! Artist lives in tree nest in city forgoing all communication...... EXCEPT THE COMMUNICATION HE HAS OVER HIS TEXT MESSAGES.... which totally null and voids the whole "non communication" thing.

The 'impression' factor on this went from 9/10 down to 2/10 in one sentence flat.

He used paint except for where it was hard then used pshop and wants to glorify the fact that he did it in paint....WTF!!!!

-mike

You said it yourself. He used photoshop for the parts that he NEEDED it for. He didnt just do one part in paint. He did everything but the blurring effect in paint.

"He used paint except for where it was hard"
Dude, he only used photoshop on the water and the sky. Look at the buildings, the gondolas, the people. Dont you think making all of that IN MICROSOFT PAINT would be a tad bit hard?

AlphaRaptor wrote:

You said it yourself. He used photoshop for the parts that he NEEDED it for. He didnt just do one part in paint. He did everything but the blurring effect in paint.

"He used paint except for where it was hard"
Dude, he only used photoshop on the water and the sky. Look at the buildings, the gondolas, the people. Dont you think making all of that IN MICROSOFT PAINT would be a tad bit hard?

I'll agree and go one further: I think that the resultant picture would have been very hard (I certainly couldn't do it) even if he used 100% pshop without ms paint! :lol: :lol:

My point wasn't whether or not it was difficult in either scenario -- my point is that it's promoted as 'done with ms paint' with the implication that 'wow, how could anyone do something so realisitic looking with just ms paint' --- but that's not what happened here.

I ran a marathon today without drinking ANY water. [gasp gasp applause]....... [SIZE=1]except for the minimal amount of water required so that my body would complete the marathon.[/SIZE]

There is a non-photoshop version of this as well. You wouldn't notice the difference till you start looking close.

jaguar wrote:

There is a non-photoshop version of this as well.

Where?