Sometimes these emerge from people’s rejection of them. What’s interesting about these works, is that they prove new creative movements do not necessarily go hand-in-hand with new technological developments.

All over the internet you can find very rewarding images, usually termed pixel art. Of course, Jim isn’t the only example of creative expression that praises these early forms of digital illustration.

His latest work on Tumblr shows, Isambard Kingdom Brunel awkwardly refusing a threesome from an elderly couple in a caravan, whilst a completely unprepared chicken, feathers and all, cooks in the oven. Today Jim has 84,000 followers on Twitter and is still doing submissions, although his requests seem to have gotten much weirder and slightly more morbid. He didn’t expect more people to be psyched about his work, but the next day his inbox was full with requests. “At this point I was literally spending about 10 minutes per picture and the requests were a bit more simple… things like A frog eating a ham sandwich or A rubber chicken doing The Charleston.”Īfter he’d created a fair collection, he put his illustrations on Tumblr and shared it with “fellow nerds” on. He’d spend his lunch break doing a many as possible. Wanting to “let off some creative steam” during his not-so-challenging daytime job, Jim took on submissions from his friends which he would subsequently draw in Paint. Today there are various people who celebrate these early forms of digital illustration, such as artist Jim’ll Paint It. If the program was really developed to let people make beautiful “paintings”, surely this would be one of the first aspects that needed to go. You might also remember the program stored documents as bitmap files, giving your masterpiece an immediate and unforgiving gritty effect once you saved it. Where other, more professional, illustration programs quickly opted for pad-and-drawing tools, Paint never felt the need to change much. As a result, improving Paint was never really on the agenda of Microsoft’s developers. When the mouse then became standard, it was no longer necessary to put much focus on the program it was just something that belonged on your computer.

The software was developed to show off the technical specs computers were capable of and how they worked best with the point-and-click capabilities of the mouse. Paint was implemented to persuade people to buy a mouse. Back in the day, when computers were just starting to become widely available, the input-device was still in an experimental phase.

The weirdest thing about Microsoft Paint is that it was never about painting.

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