Hokusai's work is amazing prima facie. But then when you download the archive.org pdf files (see links in comment from @abetusk) and start to zoom in, the mastery of the strokes just blows your mind. The skill is ridiculous. The stylization, the capturing of the essence of a bird turning its neck by basically the minimum possible strokes while maintaining the feel of dynamism and suspended motion, it is just too much. Nothing makes me more emotional and romantically sentimental of beautiful japan from an era, which in my logical head, I know had lots of hardships and difficult life. He still manages to put that aside by the sheer power of the infusion of tranquillity in his paintings. It makes me long for a time and place which I would never see and probably was a lot harsher than I can see through the mind of his brushstrokes.

Hokusai has long been my favourite artist but I still keep finding more nuances in his work. He lived an 88-year long life dedicated to art. What an unbelievable genius master of a bygone era.

For those wanting to explore automatically converting art pieces to 1-bit you can use 8Bit Photo Lab on iOS or Android. Select the black and white palette and choose resolution and dithering type.

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ilixa.ebp&...

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/8bit-photo-lab/id6759910005

I really like the layout and style of the site. I never had a mac growing up so its not a nostalgia thing, I just appreciate the compactness with contrast

The art is also very good. Its hard to get that level of "colour" with limited resolution

I love this. In a world that is increasingly driven by AI, to me this highlights how important and mandatory human creation is in art.

Impressions of The Great Wave Off Kanagawa 神奈川沖浪裏 are currently on view at a record 7 places around the world. https://greatwavetoday.com

Each one of the remaining originals is subtly different due to the woodblock printing process, and must be stored for the majority of the time due to being susceptible to fading in light.

I have been moaning about this n the comments below about not being able to find Hokusai's study on tesselations and patterns. Finally found it.

https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1899550/1/11/

Have submitted as a post

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47902993

I know this guy is doing this on actual Mac hardware but curious if there is a point of view on the best older Mac emulator out there? Ideally I'd like to run this on a current Apple Silicon Mac. It is hard to understand what is the best approach (which I realize might be because this is somewhere between legally grey and not legal). I don't want a browser based option.

I am having a surprisingly hard time finding Hokusai's exercises on tesselations.

Has search become really this bad !

Anyway wanted to show his sketch of a bird behind chicken wire fence/cage. Similar birds here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47901702

This is what keeps me coming back to HN. Someone spent years recreating woodcut prints pixel by pixel on a quadra 700 using aldus superpaint at 512x342. I feel like the constraint is what caused it to be. The 1-bit forces you to solve every gradient and texture with pure composition, which means you can't cheat with color or resolution. I forgot who said it, but constraints breed creativity.

It's insane, how far our industry has come in less than a single human lifetime. I wish I could see what will become of it in a few centuries.

Having seen this image since inception, I never noticed Mt. Fuji in the background.

Man, this is the sort of stuff that makes me glad for Hacker News. Someone doing a hyper niche, high effort artistic project for no reward other than it's something they want to do. In a time where I have to second guess absolutely everything in case it's just AI slop there's something so wonderfully human about this sort of endeavour.

I would never have known it existed and, in some tiny way, my life is better now that I do.

Curious about the "no derivatives" license. Surely anything derivative would be of the original now public domain art and not this. I do not see how this could as a practical matter be enforced. IANAL though.

More 1-bit pixel art:

> MacPaint Art From The Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today - https://blog.decryption.net.au/posts/macpaint.html

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44540402

This masterpiece by an unknown artist might be the best work of hi-res pixel art I have ever seen: https://blog.decryption.net.au/images/macpaint/lesson3d.png

Previously discussed here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866283

72 comments

By default for me site's font renders using severe sub-pixel anti-aliasing so it looks all colorful instead of good old Mac black and white. And it's very noticeable.

Dig the wave though, upvoted.

EDIT: and I think there's actually an issue... Somehow there are kinda vertical "bands" where the sub-pixel anti-aliasing shifts. Like I've got a few characters looking too green (on the entire vertical), then a band of pixels looking too red. Very strange. Firefox / Linux but others sites don't do that. First time I see those "bands" with a font using sub-pixel AA.

2nd EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35866283 In that thread from 2023 on the same site, people are noticing the same weird rainbow/banding fx so it's not just my setup ; )

I love pixel art and specifically monochrome pixel art like this.

It's a pity this blog was so short lived, I can only see 7 entries and only 2 Hokusai prints. Oh well, my own blogs usually don't fare much better.

somebody explained me that the correct way to appreciate this painting is to invert it on horizontal axis.

the reason is, japanese is read from right to left.

once you invert it you can appreciate it better

Very nice work. I've always loved the aesthetic of hand crafted monochrome pixel art.

FYI, Hokusai also drew Hentai.