I like good tools as much as anybody, but I am always impressed with what a little talent and practice can do with existing tools. This story was in the news lately, about a woman that uses nothing but MS Paint:

https://mymodernmet.com/grandma-ms-paint-art/

That’s actually an important and counterintuitive point that many newbies don’t understand. Eg, someone wants to learn to play guitar, so they go to the store and buy the cheapest, shittiest guitar available. Then they fight with it for a year and give up. It is true that a genius like Jimi Hendrix could, if he were still alive, take the exact same shitty guitar and make a 50k audience scream, but, crucially, you’re not Jimi, and as you learn, you’d very much benefit from having a good instrument. It doesn’t have to be a $10k custom or anything, but it has to be solid and enjoyable to use, because learning to play is frustrating enough as it is, and you don’t need to make it even more so.

I think a better analog might be: If you're newbie, don't start with a 42-string guitar like Pat Metheny plays sometimes. Start with a 6-string guitar. Part of the challenge of being a newbie illustrator is learning a tool used by professionals. A tool designed for amateurs might be easier for a newbie to get started with.

Its not so much the complexity of the instrument, but rather the quality. Most cheap beginner guitars have badly cut nuts, or warped necks or sharp fret edges that just make it so much harder for beginners to adapt to the instrument. Finger or hand pain is almost guaranteed.

Picking a better made instrument (substitute software dev tool, graphic design platform, cookware etc. here) will just make the process much easier, no matter your skill level.

As a counterpoint, I see lots of "all the gear no idea" kayakers who think that buying the newest design will improve their paddling, when they would be better spending more time on the river than in the shop.

Though I discussed this with someone else fairly recently- as kayaks become more idiot proof, there are a lot more incompetent people on the rivers now, "surviving" rapids that are really beyond their ability. A "worse" kayak will likely make you a better kayaker. (Though there is probably a lot less difference between the quality of kayaks and the quality of guitars).

The point is less about features, but more about quality. You don't want to fight the tool every step of the way as you first learn to use it, just because it was the cheapest thing that could still be theoretically fit for purpose.

If they are "surviving", for me it looks like money well spent :-)

That's exactly as saying that someone made a full c++ program using nothing but notepad and therefore it's impressive. All I see its someone that made their lives more difficult by purpose.

I remember some documentary with Jack White talking about how he tries to make music composition more difficult on purpose. I had a very similar reaction to yours--the example they played under his voice over wasn't very impressive to me and I'm not much of a Jack White fan to begin with.

Now that I'm writing this, I suppose one useful concept is that of constraints promoting creativity by forcing you to come at the blank canvas from a different mindset than you're used to.

I suppose there are some times to struggle and grow but other times, like a competitive swimmer shedding his 'drags', to engage our full unhindered capacity free of such artificial handicaps.

Another musical example for me is the band Amaranthe. They usually make extensive use of modern production techniques but their talent is also very evident when they're unplugged:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/J4Jhpx2Qmz4?start=61&end=290

Music video for the same song: https://youtu.be/D8lV1To-_fU

Regarding the “making composition difficult on purpose” I suggest the book “Trust the process: an artist’s guide to letting go” (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1570623570) which has lots of interesting material on how to stimulate creativity, and explicit advice about how to use the limitations you have as stepping stones to move forward instead of like constraints that impede your progress.

Really not the same thing. You could produce the same C++ program in Notepad that you could in any other editor or IDE. Here the artist is working with restricted tools in a way that the restriction becomes part of the work itself

Not really, there are a few people in the world that CAN create an image pixel by pixel using MS paint and make it look like a photo (the top people on hyper-realism) and get the very same result they would get using Photoshop, just taking tons of more time.

And even if the "restricted tools" do make a difference we are splitting hairs here, because we can create a similar equivalence, e.g. a c++ program with artificial restrictions: A program where you can't use your own classes or structs, or a program that can't be bigger than 1KB, and so on.

As an intern in a Google training program in Brazil, they gave us the project to make a crawler, without any c++ libs other than curl.

It was difficult, but we really learned a lot.

I think you fail to appreciate that learning a new skill requires some kind of connection to an already learned skill, and that this connection becomes harder to establish at old age.

The old lady's choice may have made perfect sense from her point of view.

Pretty sure whatever she knew already (e.g. oil painting) at least had anti-aliasing; what I mean is that there are tools that are even simpler than MS-paint but produce better results ("better" as in art more likely to be liked by more people)

I think I learned the ins and outs of coding a lot better by doing it by hand. Perhaps it helps reinforce and understand what you're doing. But, I see it being the same as being forced to do your math exams without a calculator in school: almost no one works that way, but if you can work that way, then when you use the calculator you become much more effective. It's more of a learning or training exercise so that when you are doing other things, you have a foundation to build on.

Creativity = Originality / Tools used

Even though that’s very impressive I can’t help but think that the end result would look so much better if she used a more reasonable tool to do it.

I think her pieces are informed by the essential character of the medium, no different than if she had used watercolors instead of oils.

It's not really about that. It's about making expression, where there's limit, so that there is art.

digital painting is fundamentally very simple; if you put the right shapes of color in the right places, you can create a visual representation of anything. robh rupple's process is a good visual representation of this idea imo >http://graphicla.tumblr.com/post/68284245282/ive-been-rethin... the underlying knowledge as to what makes pleasing shapes and the interactions between colors is the source of complexity. many brilliant pieces are created with oekaki programs far more limited and simplistic than ms paint, pixiv and 2ch are full of artists that are a testament to this. anything that can make shapes and colors of some description is capable of producing great art, good software simply reduces the number of necessary headaches required to do so.

Didn't Notch use MS Paint for Minecraft?

Use what works and what you're familiar with.

Not that Minecraft has particularly demanding graphics!

I'd say krita and gimp fill different needs. Krita is for artists and Gimp is like Linux's MS paint on steroids. I frequently use Gimp to crop images, make memes, etc. When I used to draw with my wacom tablet, krita was the tool of choice.

> Gimp is like Linux's MS paint on steroids

Oh yeah, if steroids bring layers, masks, paths, a shitload of selection, transformation, and cropping tools, a whole lot of filters and loaders for all sorts of image file formats, complete color management support, 32-bit per channel processing and suchlike, then you might be correct :)

>complete color management support

GIMP still only half-supports CMYK in 2018, though. But as someone who uses it professionally, I agree that GIMP is a Linux's Photoshop, not a Linux's MS Paint. I'm guessing that the user you replied to has only used it as such and hasn't dive into all the tools and features it offers. With all the bugs and half-broken tools it has, I still think it is a great piece of software, and my life would be much harder without it.

> I agree that GIMP is a Linux's Photoshop, not a Linux's MS Paint

Photoshop had massive, productivity boosting features like Adjustment Layers, since the 4th release, in 1996!! simple non destructive effects were added to the list with 5.0 in 1998. That's 20 years ago. In 20 years, almost every single serious tool for image manipulation has understood that non destructive editing is at the core of productivity. Krita has it. Photoshop almost always had it. Lightroom has it. Affinity Photos has it. Pixelmator has it. The venerable shareware Paintshop Pro, one of the first popular Photoshop clone, grew that feature. Picasa, a free (as in beer, not as in freedom) photo library management and quick photo editing tool that was immensely popular on Windows before Google dropped it, had fast non destructive image editing.

Editing anything in GIMP feels like a painful process that allows no mistake and every single process, even just drawing a damn circle (one that doesn't have heavy artifacts by the way), takes more clicks or keyboard shortcut presses than it ever should. I know it's free software developed on some hobby developer's free time but that does not make it immune from criticism. Just because something is free doesn't make it good or worth considering. As a tool for producing content, the GIMP really is more linux's MS paint than photoshop. That's because Photoshop stopped being an overgrown paint-with-layers program since the 1996 release. I still remember how it felt to use the 5.0 release of Photoshop as if it was yesterday's. If I had no choice but to use 20 years old Photoshop vs 2018 GIMP, I'd pick the 20 years old software.

Half-broken tools? I know there are good reasons to dislike Cage Transform, but what other tools are half-broken?

I use "pinta" on Linux when I need an equivalent to MS paint.

Paint.net is pretty notable too. Windows only, but free, and halfway between paint and what Adobe offers. There are many plugins that either meet or exceed what you can find for Photoshop.

Both Pinta and Krita had really weird interactions with my touch screen the last time I tried. GIMP was the only one who worked correctly - I presume because it just treated it as a mouse (it may well be that my Linux configuration is to blame, not Pinta and Krita)

Perhaps things work better now.

Yeah, I think Pinta could be considered as MS Paint++ for Linux.

I use kolour paint. Don't really do much outside of resizing and cropping though.

Seconding. I'm pretty happy with KolourPaint, but all I use it for is resizing, cropping, and blocking out people's names and pictures in social media screenshots.

That's exactly the opposite of my experience. Krita is fine for the "crop images, make memes, etc" use case and for most artist-like things, but I found Gimp had slightly better tablet support (at least on Windows).

Krita has much better default pressure curves though. The default settings on the gimp are basically unusable with how nonlinear they are.

Yeah, this is something we've been looking into for a while.

See e.g. https://plus.google.com/+AmericoGobbo/posts/VK4oZv7Hobn and around.

The UI is much more intuitive to me than the one in GIMP, but it's probably a lack of experience with it from my part.

I've used GIMP for ~10 years and the UI still confuses me.