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⇱ Introducing Low Res Paint - Peter Coles


Mr Coles Peter Coles’ blog

09 September 2009

Introducing Low Res Paint

Try the the “low res paint“ demo…

Are you tired of photoshop and all of its features? Do you yearn for a program like MS Paint and want your brush to fill 10 pixel wide squares at a time? Well, look no further! After getting stuck waiting for a delayed train with no internet, no movies, no books, and one laptop with a power cord, I created Low Res Paint. It’s written using basic javascript and no canvas object, so it will even work (mostly) on internet explorer 6.

It features a brush, a bucket, and an eraser. More so, you can apply custom backgrounds, some are provided, or you can link to any image on the web. For example, I can draw a super scary, fire-breathing sea serpent as such:

👁 Image

And then I can place it near a beach:

👁 Image

Or even take that same beastly serpent and have it attack Coney Island:

👁 Image

Enjoy! Also, be careful, there's no “undo”.

Start painting!

Some brief technical take-aways: the pixels are represented by floating divs (making them position absolute was considerably more load on the browser), and—as you might imagine—there’s no javascript framework, I lazily started building this with jquery and quickly realized that it was overkill for what I needed and that it would also kill the browser if I would try a paint bucket fill.

Update: I added another post explaining how the generate image feature actually works.

Comments (4)

1. chris dixon wrote:

i think it would be cool if you had a gallery where people could show off their works.

Posted on 9 September 2009 at 12:09 PM  |  permalink

2. peter wrote:

That would be fun. I wanted to keep it as pure javascript with nothing server-side, but we'll see what develops…

Posted on 9 September 2009 at 3:09 PM  |  permalink

3. lauren wrote:

Your serpent is so cute!

Posted on 9 September 2009 at 11:09 PM  |  permalink

4. chris dixon wrote:

what about taking a page from the twitter playbook and only allowing 11x11 pixel images (under 140 dots). i think it would be fun to use that to create profile imagies.

Posted on 10 September 2009 at 4:09 PM  |  permalink




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👁 Peter Coles

Peter Coles

is a software engineer living in NYC who is building Superset 💪 and also created GoFullPage 📸
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