by mrandish | 2025-04-18 20:13:30+00:00
I'm looking for recommendations for other current Windows paint programs more in the style of old-school 90s paint software (DeluxePaint) but with modern affordances and fun, interactive features especially for empowering un-skilled, non-artists to just enjoy doodling around for hours like I used to back in the day. To be clear, I'm not necessarily looking for the creative constraints of retro pixel art resolutions and color limitations, I just want to recapture that feeling of discoverable, interactive, creative power being made accessible for unskilled, non-artists. Kind of where the 90s paint programs felt like they were headed before the complexity, precision and specialization of later Photoshop took over.

Longer Context

Going back to to the early 80s I've always loved playing with computer drawing programs - despite having no real artistic skill. In the 8-bit era, even the best (like Micropainter on the Apple II) were functional yet still fairly primitive. Starting with 16-bit computers and programs like the legendary DeluxePaint, paint software really started to get fun and I could spend hours just doodling around. It was highly interactive and there was really nothing to know since the tool palette surfaced the main functionality. Tools like undo, zoom and snap helped duffers like me accomplish our modest creative aspirations.

In the late 80s and early 90s the rapid progression of paint programs was incredible. There were four capable platforms (Amiga, Atari ST, PC, Mac) and each had their own native programs constantly releasing new versions in competition with each other. Any good idea or new tool on one platform quickly migrated to the others, often in improved form. And there were also high-end, custom hardware-based paint systems like Quantel's $60,000 paintbox for broadcast graphics creation, In the days when 32 colors at 320 x 200 was a lot, a Paintbox could composite layers of full res, true color video stills using hardware blending. While wildly impressive and beyond the reach of current 16-bit desktops, software developers just viewed it as another aspirational target, which lead to arcane beam-racing, scanline palette-swapping trickery which got surprisingly close to a Paintbox. That whole era in paint software was an intense crucible of evolutionary innovation that was exhilarating to experience as a user.

As PCs advanced to 32-bit CPUs with PCI and AGP busses driving XGA (and beyond) resolutions at 16 and 24-bit depth using graphics cards with 2D drawing acceleration, all the earlier hardware barriers fell. With 24-bit dithering and anti-aliasing enabling smooth gradients and sharp edges, stair-stepped edges and visible pixels became a choice instead of a limitation. Then Photoshop emerged as the market leader, except that Photoshop became so dominant because it expanded to serve previously divergent use cases like photo editing and retouching, graphic design, print layout and typography. Serving these different masters triggered spiraling complexity along with an increasingly modal do-everything-for-everyone interface. Professional workflows demanded absolute precision and granular control. That dictated segregating pixels into discrete layers, objects and, eventually, 'smart' objects. Integrating vector graphics further continued the abstractions away from concrete pixels.

It was all wildly powerful and no doubt professionally productive but the focus was clearly on enabling any desired end result as efficiently as possible with little regard for user's enjoyment while doing so. I used Photoshop and appreciated its power but, as a non-daily user, I eventually noticed I was spending more time figuring out how to get it to do what I wanted, and sometimes even what mode I was in, than putting down pixels. Simply doodling around seemed a lot less fun. Recently I went back and tried Deluxe Paint 5 on an Amiga. It was fun in all the ways I remember but it also didn't scratch the itch I've been feeling. I'm not looking to experience the creative constraints of retro pixel art resolutions and color limitations, I just want that feeling of interactive, discoverable, creative power for unskilled non-artists. Are there still tools out there targeting that use case?