'Pixel by pixel': MS Paint artist mourns his medium as Microsoft pulls the plug

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UPDATE: MS Paint lives another day. On Monday evening, Microsoft announced "MS Paint is here to stay." In a blog post, the company released the following statement.

Boston artist Pat Hines has dabbled with the most advanced digital illustration programs technology has to offer, but he always gravitates back to his first love — Microsoft Paint.

"I just really enjoy it. It's almost like meditation for me when I use it. I could never get into anything else," Hines told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.

"It's the only medium where my voice kind of came out. I sort of developed my own style."

When he learned on Monday that Microsoft is pulling the plug on his beloved medium, it came as a shock.

"At first I was a little panicked, but when I realized I have the different versions of the program saved on a couple different computers … I'll be fine," he said.

"But it makes me sad for younger people. Newer users won't get a chance to experience its charms."

Paint has been a key feature of Microsoft since it was released as ZSoft's PC Paintbrush on Windows 1.0 in 1985. But it will not be featured in the Windows fall update.

Instead, users will be left with its newer sister program, Paint 3D, which is used to create three-dimensional illustrations.

Hines initially discovered Paint in 1995 on his family's first home computer — but he really honed his skills in the early 2000s while working as an overnight security guard at a Boston hospital.

"This was before Facebook, before YouTube and all that," he said. "And I kind of just started using Paint and it kind of whittled​ away the hours, the long hours, at that reception desk."

He found a sense of satisfaction in that early work that he never experienced from drawing on paper.

"I could always draw, but I was never happy with how my stuff came out," he said. "But with Paint, for whatever reason, all my stuff, when I finished it, it looked exactly as I had pictured it in my head, or even better." 

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Nowadays, Hines is known as an MS Paint artist. He has worked exclusively in the medium for years, making portraits, landscapes and characters — some realistic and some stylized.

He even used the old-school graphics editing software to make all the illustrations and promotional material for his book Camp Redblood and The Essential Revenge.

"I'm pretty sure no one has ever done anything like that before," he said.

Hines said he appreciates the control Paint gives him over his work as he draws with a mouse rather than a stylus. And while he admits it's "basically a dinosaur of a program," he said its limits have widened the scope of his own creativity.

"I really think if you put limitations on yourself creatively, it forces you to be more creative and come up with different solutions for different problems," he said.

"It's really a very simple, straightforward process and anyone that watches me work has said, 'Wow, you really just do it pixel by pixel.'"

Hines said he's saddened that emerging artists will never discover the tool, which he praises for its simplicity and accessibility.

"The great thing about it is it is so simple that literally a five-year-old could start playing with it, whereas something like Photoshop, it's obviously more complicated," he said. 

For more original MS Paint work, check out the subreddit r/mspaint.