Patrick Hines’ graphic novel “Camp Redblood and The Essential Revenge” goes to show that given enough time, you can do pretty much anything with the most rudimentary of tools. Short of cracking open a hex editor and inputting the RGB values yourself, Microsoft’s Paint is as basic as it gets to creating art. Somehow, Hines managed to craft an exquisite series of cartoons and publish them via ebook using the lowliest of image editors.
Speaking with The Manual’s Bryan Holt, Hines provides the perfect analogy for the painstaking effort required to create art with Microsoft Paint:
“I always thought of the Paint window like the hole Tim Robbins was digging out of his cell in The Shawshank Redemption, with the “minimize” button being the girly poster that hid it,” said Hines.
Hines apparently sharpened his skills starting in 2004 while working nights at a hospital. Microsoft’s array of built-in games failed to hold his interest and so, Hines was left with Paint. Turns out the humble application helped him find his artistic “voice”:
“On paper I was always trying to be another artist, but in Paint it felt like I’d found my own voice. I kept going back though, trying to learn the other programs because I wasn’t “supposed” to work in Paint, but I always gravitated back to it.”
You can see his work via his DeviantArt page or alternatively, hit up Amazon for his opus, Camp Redblood and The Essential Revenge.
[Amazon, via The Manual]