Homage to MacPaint..

…or why I made an Illustrator swatch set of the original Macpaint patterns

In 1984 when my older brother started his freshman year at Drexel University, every student was given a Macintosh computer. This was the original Mac, the one with one floppy drive and 128K of memory! Playing with this machine was a revelation for my 10th grade self, and when my brother wasn’t using it for his school work, I was able to mess with it way into the evening to create comics.
The comic was Nick the Punk Fish, a named coined by a camp counselor who somehow thought it would be funny if the comic was named after me (Nick the Punk Fish was also known by his acronym NTPF. ) In my adolescent joy, I thought my NTPF comics were pretty hysterical (or so stupid, that they were worth laughing about) and I would work industriously on trying to complete entire stories (I think there are two total) This was no easy feat as this was rudimentary computer graphics which meant having to be pretty crafty. (A full story is posted below for all you NTPF enthusiasts out there)
Recently I was looking through Illustrator swatch patterns to find some basic bitmap style patterns (in the style of MacPaint) and could find any, so I decided to make them myself. You can download them here.
To use them, open up Illustrator and make a new document, open the swatches palette (WINDOW menu > SWATCHES if it is not visible) then click on the menu for SWATCHES, go to OPEN SWATCH LIBRARY then go to OTHER. From here you can load any Illustrator file with saved custom swatches, but in this case you will open macpaint_pattern_swatches.ai. ENJOY!