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Comment by JoeDaDude | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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 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)

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 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.

Creativity = Originality / Tools used

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.

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!

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