MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today

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.

Look at this one for example - my mind is blown: https://blog.decryption.net.au/images/macpaint/lesson3d.png

How do you even do that? Zoomed out it looks like a nearly photorealistic street scene, zoomed in I just see seemingly meaningless patterns of black and white. Magic. Unbelievable.

> How do you even do that?

Dithering, for one. The parent also suggests pointillism, which was also a popular modern art technique for making detailed portraits using small, low-detail components.

There's a few - including that one - that look like they're photos pulled through a transformation code. I'm probably wrong though - dithering seems to be incredibly difficult to get right, see e.g. https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg136374...

This image in particular made me wonder if there was some type of tracing aid involved. Maybe the dutch-looking street reminded me of Vermeer's method. I wonder what input device they were using? I was using a pretty nice input surface for doing CAD work sometime around 1990-93 on a PC, and we had occasion to lay transparencies on top and trace on them. I don't know if Macs 5 years before that had this type of peripheral. And anyway, there were certainly some special artists I knew of back then who could do this with a mouse and enough time.

They could have been cleaning up a scan of a photo, ThunderScan came out real early in the Mac's life.

Scanned drawing + painting over it with dither patterns is an option too.

Definitely not a Dutch street. More likely a German, Austrian/Swiss, or Alsatian (France) one. Those kind of half-timbered houses are extremely uncommon in the Netherlands.