MS Paint

This page needs work. Please help us by expanding it. If you aren't sure how to help, check the article guide Format and Content
Reason: Some images need crediting.

MS Paint is a subgenre of Old Web. The visual of the aesthetic applied to digital drawings that use solid colors and lines, or use Windows' built-in image editor, Microsoft Paint.

History[]

MS Paint was released on 1985, alongside the first version of Microsoft's Windows as an art software. The program was, and still is, very popular, since it comes bundled with all versions of Microsoft Windows. The tool has recently been deprecated in favor of Paint 3D, though it is still accessible today and even received a UI revamp for Windows 11.

Visuals[]

As is the name, these are usually made in MS Paint, with its limited tools compared to other image editing or art software. Due to these limitations, a lot of the drawings that are made with it low quality (whether it's intentional or not); flat or not, colors with thick, wavy lines, simple features, and some mistakes here and there. A lot of the time, text is done with the text tool and the default font. Thus, these made up the aesthetic. Visuals can be anything, but very popular things are as follows:

People
Faces
Everything being in a white void
Existing pictures (such as stock images or game sprites) pasted in with others or original art
Comics
Memes/memey imagery
OCs and existing characters

Media[]

Due to its easy accessibility on many computers, MS Paint was very popular to use in the early days of YouTube; anywhere from video comics to full animations.

Video Games[]

Space Funeral
Booby Tales (no boobs are in the game, it's SFW)
Mundoland 2 (Spanish RPG Maker game)
Pizza Tower (despite the fact its sprites were made using Aseprite)
Undertale & Deltarune (many sprites use default MS Paint colors)
Doom & Doom II Hell on Earth (despite the fact its sprites were made using Deluxe Paint)
Mortal Kombat (despite the fact its sprites were made using the actors)

Television[]

Adventure Time
Homestar Runner
The Big Lez Show

Webfiction[]

Homestuck
Tails Gets Trolled
Sonichu
Nyan~ Neko Sugar Girls
Eggsanta and Mop
My Jungle Book, Your Year
Mike and Melissa

Videos[]

breakcore fans (2022)
YouTube MS Paint Joker drawing videos (2008-2019)

Subgenres[]

Oekaki[]

Oekaki (お絵描き) is Japanese for "drawing". On the internet, it is the term for a simplistic drawing tool used on message boards. It is similar to the MS Paint aesthetic due to the lack of advanced features.

Silly[]

Joyful and silly characters made with simple shapes having a circle for a face, became popular in the 2020s. Most of the time there is an emoticon on this face =D, OWO and =3 are the most used emoticons on the face. This also includes the "TBH creature".