Microsoft may soon be ditching its Paint program in favour of something a little more high-tech, its new Paint 3D program.
Every computer I have ever had has come preloaded with a program called Paint. It has been a part of Windows. It allows you to draw (usually shaky) lines of various thicknesses and colours with your mouse, so you can do stick figures and messages and apologetic hearts that you can send to your girlfriend when you have annoyed her. Children could draw with it and practise controlling a mouse. And indeed any children who grew up in the nineties probably did use it. It was a very practical program.
Paint was also useful for creating cool advertising posters or CD covers: You just imported a photo and you could lay text over it in any font. It was a primitive graphic-design program.
I say was because it now risks being laid off as a stalwart Windows workhorse. In a recent statement, Microsoft has listed applications slated for "removal" or "deprecation" from the next iteration of Windows. Paint is "deprecated," meaning it is no longer "in active development" and may well be cut from the bundle. (A couple of other programs you may enjoy have also been fired: Outlook Express, for example, has been removed for being "non-functional legacy code," which is how I feel some days.)
You can download a free program that is almost exactly the same, called Paint.NET – indeed some people say it's better than Microsoft's Paint – but you won't because you will never think about Paint again. Windows 10 has a more sophisticated drawing program called Paint 3D, which enables you to draw three-dimensional objects and have them automatically shaded, and then placed and rotated as you wish. If you are good at it, you can make cartoon-like figures that look like the products of Hollywood animation studios. It also provides you with a number of stock people and animals to use; they can also be rotated as if three-dimensional. Your drawing skills have been upgraded for you.
This means all children's drawing skills have been automatically upgraded, too – and changed to better imitate a dominant entertainment paradigm.
Windows apps have an effect on how we perceive drawing itself, on what we imagine drawing to be. When millions of computers around the world have the same free drawing app – and that app makes childlike, finger-painty drawings – then the global visual landscape is perceptibly altered. The next generation will perceive drawing to be a reproduction of a different kind of children's illustration – that of the big-budget computer-animated movie (think Despicable Me). Unlike the images generated by Paint – which could pretty easily be duplicated with coloured markers – the kind of smooth shading provided by Paint 3D is hard for a child to accomplish with everyday tools. So the app has moved us away from a concept of drawing as achievable with material tools. It moves us close to a conception of drawing as something that is done only in the digital realm.
Perhaps purely by coincidence, a new video game for computers and phones turns Paint-style drawing into a competition. Passpartout: The Starving Artist allows you to draw clumsy pictures with your mouse and then sell them to virtual passersby. The more you sell, the more you can build your career and the more fine tools for prettier pictures you can acquire. It combines creativity with the financial pressures of an actual career. This sounds insanely stressful to me (I mean, surely most people turn to video games as an escape from having to have a career?) but reviewers say the pleasure is in creating the pictures using this simple, old-fashioned interface. It doesn't have the instant 3-D option. I'm guessing most of these reviewers were children in the 1990s – they are experiencing the nostalgic pleasure of Paint.
The tech media have been reporting on the demise of Paint with a vague alarm. They can't say why they feel its loss is a big deal – is it just nostalgia? – but they know it is somehow significant, symbolic of something. Perhaps what they are feeling is the realization that a hegemonic software company has the power to change, with one top-down marketing decision, the look of amateur graphics around the world, and to define the aesthetics of a generation.