Category Archives: DIGITAL ART

A 97 year old, nearly blind man who works wonders with MS Paint

His name is Hal Lasko, his nickname Grandpa. What he did for living is something we will probably never see again – he was a graphic artist back when everything was done by hand. He then had to retired and his caring family had the genius idea to introduce him to the computer and especially to Microsoft Paint.

Since then Grandpa spends ten hours a day moving pixels around his computer paintings. Some would call his work pointillism, others 8-Bit art but it might be a bit of both.

Anyway, another inspiration that is Hal Lasko, The Pixel Painter. We have included below a video interview of the artist plus a few examples of his works.

Hal Lasko | Art-Pie

Hal Lasko | Art-Pie

Hal Lasko | Art-Pie

Tatsuo Horiuchi | the 73-year old Excel spreadsheet artist

Meet Tatsuo Horiuchi, a 73-year old Excel spreadsheet artist. Yes I know, you must be thinking “Excel spreadhseet, wth?!. While millions of us would dive into the software and try to make sense of crazy formulas, Tatsuo Horiuchi has turned it into an amazing art generator.

And guess what, it  is only just before retiring that he thought he had to do something new in his life and went on buying a computer, discovered Excel and has now mastered like no one the tool to produce pretty eye catching pieces.

“I never used Excel at work but I saw other people making pretty graphs and thought, ‘I could probably draw with that,’” says Tatsuo Horiuchi

“Graphics software is expensive but Excel comes pre-installed in most computers,” explained Horiuchi. “And it has more functions and is easier to use than [Microsoft] Paint.” adds Tatsuo Horiuchi

This artist is annoyingly good at what he does. Back to my formulas for my part.

Tatsuo Horiuchi | Art-Pie

Tatsuo Horiuchi | Art-Pie

Tatsuo Horiuchi | Art-Pie

Have a peek at some of the Excel spreadsheets, it is pretty incredible
Cherry Blossoms at Jogo Castle (2006)
Kegon Falls (2007)

First view on Spoon & Tamago

ASCII art

ASCII art | Art-PieI do not know for you but 2 of my hobbies or 2 of the things I spend most of my time doing, are typing on a computer and looking at, reading, writing or producing art so the so call ASCII art could just be the form of art I have been looking for.

ASCII art?

ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII).

Long story short – they are numbers, letter and characters.

What is remarkable about this art, beyond the fact that serious artists out there produce stunning pieces, is that, one of the main reasons behind the emergence of this technique, was because early printers often lacked graphics ability and thus characters were used in place of graphic marks (pixels will then take over printing).

Let your creativity speaks (and have some patience)

We have included some of the best ASCII art we found on the web. Remarkable right?

Click any picture to start the slideshow and let us know your favourite in the comments below. Ours is the Jack Nicholson one depicting of course a scene and the cover of Stanley Kubrick‘s movie – The Shinning 

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