A professional illustrator spent +2 months in isolation creating over 150 images in Kid Pix. Here’s what they learned.

This is a public post. 

Hi old friends, new friends, or incredulous strangers.

This bizarre article title and subsequent art are about something silly and—I pray—entertaining. In truth, the wacky shapes and colors of Kid Pix betray its origins in my life: a pandemic wreaking death and destruction, (and mid-writing, international protests as the USA’s crimes against humanity become ever elucidated). Even people in my dreams are now isolating. Please follow my Patreon for free updates on my unusual but somehow edifying career. And don’t forget to check my backlog for some of the most important writing I’ve ever done.

Stay safe, stay healthy, and thank you for spending your precious time with my writing.

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It feels good to be bad

One of the few constants throughout my life is that I love underdogs. Anything deemed too limited, obscure, or broken to succeed has always endeared itself to me. As a child, I loved reading material too complex for me to understand. I loved picking low-tier characters in fighting games. I found myself silently cheering for the antagonists or monsters in certain stories, or at least praying intently that it turns out well for them in the end. My younger self wrestled this into his identity, trying too hard to be cool. As a young adult, I overcorrected by hiding certain parts that made me different from my environment.

Naturally, this would find its way into my art career. Spend two years only in black and white. Spend one year choking on drawing mistakes by only working in ballpoint pen or Sharpies. Study languages even though you’re extremely bad at language-learning. Whether in hobbies or in art, I live for the bittersweet nature of finding success only after feeling completely incompetent.

More than my love of bad art programs may be my love for digital art created in unconventional programs. Since 2009 I used Alchemy on an almost daily basis, convinced that the lack of conventional tools, layers, and undo would make it the hyperbolic time chamber of digital art. I spent hundreds of hours in high school making animations in Pictochat, a primitive chat client and not an art program, on the Nintendo DS. Before that I was spending Middle School grinding away on MS PAINT, trying to do realistic paintings of planets on a per-pixel level. Before that I spent childhood summers trying to create digital paintings in the Super Gameboy software, which was only intended for customizing a frame to surround Gameboy gameplay on your CRT. Mario Paint? No, I somehow never had that.

My unconventional digital art practices bled into analog realms: self-portrait drawn with a cookie or a full figure drawing with some chunk of carbon from the yard. As these experimental, lower standard mediums leave one with little to lose, a real test of bravery is tampering with your focused and controlled traditional art. I’ve set pieces on fire and torn up finished drawings before, knowing that taping remaining pieces together afterwards may produce a more effective art piece.

There’s something to be said about choosing the best art materials one can afford. (Friends don’t let friends buy their children Roseart.) While absolutely valid, the validation I’ve squeezed out of materials deemed unlikely or impossible has far surpassed the security I’ve felt in using the most professional hardware / software / materials. The fear of failure an artist faces, in my experience, never goes away in its entirety. An artist who’s been drawing with a pencil in their right hand for years can be intimidated by a blank piece of paper. Tell said artist that they have to do the drawing using their mouth or foot to hold the pencil, and fear becomes irrelevant. Of course it’ll be bad, but it will also be fun.

And in that silly assignment is an extremely important truth for any creator.

Kid Pix offers a childhood I never had

Craig Hickman created Kid Pix 1.0 in 1989, with the intention of making digital art more accessible for his 3-year-old son. Its undeniable success would see distribution and further iterations by multiple prominent developers. Children who attended an American elementary school in the last ten years probably had experiences with the more modern Kid Pix versions at least once. These young adults usually seem to have fond memories of Kid Pix, often initiating art inspiration or entertainment during their otherwise unlikable school careers. 

One year ago, I started thinking a lot about this art edutainment program from the late 80’s. Sadly, my school days were too long ago and my school district too poor to ever grant me firsthand experience with Kid Pix. Today, tongue-in-cheek references towards Kid Pix can still be found in the dustier corners of Twitter. When you see a screenshot of the program, you’ll see why “looks like it was done in Kid Pix” is a modern insult.

A cursory glance at the Kid Pix UI makes a few points obvious:

- This is very 90s.

- This is made for children.

and, my absolute favourite part;

- This silly art program will produce—at best—images we can only enjoy ironically.

Even as abandoned software today, my inner child pined for this experience, but how and what could I stream on it? I felt such a cheeky 90s kid’s digital art program required an equally cheeky event to match. My partner and I had done fundraisers in the past to raise money for friends in need, but doing something this silly would be better served for ourselves. Over a year ago I thought of streaming Kid Pix as a community event, but to get the most out of the disconnect between Kid Pix and my adult life, I intended for what few dollars I’d have raised to pay for beer and weed. Sadly, that time never arrived. Sasha and I do only one vacation per year, and we may cut an impressive amount of monthly costs, but like many Millennials stuck in this sordid gig economy, raising money for a single night, just for fun, felt impermissible. That summer of 2019, I decided to save Kid Pix for a later date. When, if ever, I did not know. It wasn’t the first time our idea for a funraiser (sic) had to be pushed aside to deal with constant financial stressors, and it wouldn’t be the last.

Kid Pix lets you get weird.

For normal commissions, there are only certain kinds of budgets and topics I'm willing to take on. All of that, save Twitch TOS, goes out the window. I get to have fun doing absolutely weird and wonderful designs. You know, the kinds I things I'd never typically publish.

Let me introduce you to Happy Girl:

Happy Girl is one of the many included backgrounds in Kid Pix. Happy Woman, if you're reading this, I would love to see what your relationship to being included in Kid Pix was now that you're old-enough to read . And I'd also like to apologize that one of the commissions I was paid to make was this:


But that's not all! There is still one more Happy Girl commission worthy of mentioning:

"What if I did an entire character image using only the cut tool and Happy Girl, to complete a character commission with absolutely no drawing tools used?" This is the result. It's a really cool character image until you realize it's surrounded by baby teeth.

The memes were plentiful. The moment I incorrectly pasted the heads at the bottom, the entire livestream had a strong reaction.

Doing humorous actions and expressions is also a rare treat. Trying to get down acting is a nice challenge, and the humor seems to pair well with technical limitations.

I got to turn another Kid Pix background into a Silent Hill 3 reference! One of my friends donated for this image because they knew I had a crush on Heather Mason when I was in high school.

"Would you be okay with a Neopets fanart commission?" Normally, no. In the middle of hundreds of thousands of Americans unnecessarily dying in a pandemic? Yes, I will do a Neopets fanart commission.


Typically, I wouldn't be too into the idea of foot-focus commissions, because I have my own complicated history with the subject matter, and I don't want to gain the attention of fans who care only about feet. So a Kid Pix commission stream was a perfect chance to try something new! Here are a few image for my plantigrade furry supporters:

Kid Pix asks you to killing your darlings

I’ve had many things not turn out how I was expecting. My parents divorced in 4th grade. I’ve lost over 30k words of journaling and 2 years of digital art studies to a computer crash during a backup. I was in an intercultural marriage, despite barely ever leaving white Midwest America. My marriage to an amazing woman also ended in a divorce. I’ve got a learning disability and a separate mental disability that, when I can’t hide it, that absolutely wrecks my emotions. Most of my immediate blood family is either dead or doesn’t talk to me anymore. I started out as a transphobe and homophobe before accepting that I’m queer, eventually dating a trans person, and realizing I’m actually agender. I accepted years ago that I could die any second, and that I wasn’t behoved to a squeaky clean life in politics, Conservative Christianity, or academia. These elements of my narrative are a setup for my being abysmal at certain art-related attributes, and very good at others.

Not only does this example feature an actual baby, but also a splatter paint tool that somehow activated all over the image. I could never again figure out how to make splatters happen, and "im leaf kid" suggested by a viewer, was a last ditch attempt to save the whole image.

“Kill your darlings and/or babies” is a saying you’ll hear in some creative fields. To kill one’s darlings is to omit something you loved in service to a better whole. All visual artists know this struggle firsthand, having drawn the perfect eye/hair/big ol’ glowing butthole, only to realize that these darlings no longer fit the rest of the image. This mistake we are damned to repeat so long as we don’t think in the big picture. This is guaranteed for perfectionists and creatives in the middle of larger assignments. One cannot create what one should without a balance of stubbornness and also humility. Life at large holds this lesson for all of us—even non-creators—in a marriage of both exploring and analyzing. Life is not meant to be tailored to one’s exact specifications. Ideally, one approaches life laterally, in defiance of a right/left brain binary, finding the sweet spot between certainty and creativity. For careers with much less forgiveness towards mistakes, say Infosec, Aerospace, Medicine, or Social Work, this sets us to see the world through patently un-creative lenses.

Source: Marc Delassio

Art progress—and often life progress—is about bridging the ever-changing gap between one’s observations and one’s abilities. I am convinced, in my life full of many twists and turns, that I’m better than the average person at killing a darling. I may laugh if my art program crashes, but I won’t falter. When I first started Kid Pix, my assignment was to determine what does NOT crash the program. With only one undo state and only one layer to work with, and a digital workspace smaller than two vertical credit cards stuck next to each other, nothing is darling. Life is ephemeral, and even so digital art. Kid Pix graciously grants the artist the blessing of a constant Memento Mori:

“All of this could be gone any second.”

“Your art will never be more than 508 pixels at the largest size.”

“You like how this program looks and sounds because tricks you into experiencing a childhood that died before you even got to experience it.”

“I made a boobooooooooo, yeah.”

Kid Pix will surprise the public.

Before the days of digital portfolios and social media, a promising young artist drove a good distance to a studio for a job interview. Mailing back and forth between he and an art director at the studio raised his confidence in landing work. After confirming the appointment with secretary, he walked back to the car, pulled several of his paintings from his trunk, and headed to a meeting room to talk with the AD. Within seconds of placing his paintings on the table, he was rejected and sent home. The artist’s paintings were protected by being wrapped in trash bags. While this served the purpose of protecting his artwork within his otherwise empty car trunk, the AD felt it showed a lack of pride and professionalism in the artist’s work. The AD felt like their time was being disrespected, and so the correspondence, and hopes of an art career at that studio, was dropped.

A young sculptor moved to Santa Fe, living in a tent at her work site. Some of her gorgeous work was on display on the ground in front of her modest tent, for visitors of a work tour to enjoy. Despite the raw and emotive qualities of her work, her work didn't receive many offers. Later in her career,  her work of similar caliber and theme was purchased consistently at a gallery in the same town.

I heard the first story in university. It sounds old-fashioned, almost like a chain email, but surely something to that effect denied an artist a job at some point. The second story is the experience of a dear friend of mine. She’s the one that instilled in me the power that comes from presentation. It’s the reason she and her artist husband have a showroom in their house. Having a beautiful and controlled context to how their artwork is presented, it makes all the difference in the world. 

Let us look at a modest digital study of a cat, and in doing so, completely invert the lesson of these last two stories: 

This image is not a bad representation of reality. At first you’d expect it to be a photo, but if you said a 32-year-old doing art their whole life painted this image in photoshop, it will not impress anyone. Some of my readers are professional artists or long-time art consumers, and, like me, it probably takes something more to impress them than a decent photo study. 

The frame around this image is automatically a different experience. It’s even impressive to me, despite being the artist and one who is normally left unimpressed. The reason I’m impressed is probably the same reason (along with mass appeal of cats) why it did well on Twitter: the program in which the art was created has changed how the viewer feels. Young adults who grew up with Kid Pix have never seen anything like this done in the program before. This program was not designed for professionals, and it was not designed to create realistic studies of your friends cats. Seeing the Kid Pix UI next to the study produces whiplash. This phenomenon produces some of the better compliments I received: folks telling me I’m “too powerful” when it comes to Kid Pix, or that I “need to be stopped”. 

Kid Pix forces a 90s kid to consider their past.

I was a born in ’88. For reference, my earliest memories may have been the Madrid Olympics of 1992. I lived in in the Ohio Rust Belt, in a lower middle class family with very hard-working parents. 

A 90's Taco Bell interior provides a safe space for this dragon's complicated relationship to his childhood.

My nostalgia for “A E S T H E T I C” is in harsh contrast to my aesthetic choices as a child. Trying my best to not fit into stereotypes, I avoided Children’s Programming unless I thought it was cool or mature enough to justify. In my overcompensation, I also sought out mature content whenever I could get away with it, in part because it made me feel more mature for consuming it. For my bedspread, carpet, and any personal affects I prioritized muted colours, nothing more ostentatious than an earth tone. Despite a few exceptions, like soccer jerseys or a couple videogame tee shirts, my outfits also became more subtle while also trying to be as cool as possible. Coolness, for me, was rooted in acceptance. Coolness meant, I hoped, being treated like an adult, or at least as a valuable person, as soon as possible. I wanted to be smart, to be taken seriously, to be seen as hilarious, and to be liked.

A couple years after Vaporwave hit the internet, the early 2010s, an eager embracing of 90’s and early 2000’s aesthetics hit the public sphere and started their tight grip on my mind and heart. Large, playful, and obvious shapes in industrial design, illustration, layout, merchandise, and UI shouted excitedly at consumers. The squiggles, swirls, and distortions marked an era where millions of American homes started becoming more and more digital. Over the last several years in my adult life, I could feel a mounting excitement towards these design choices. 

There is power in bending the limits of edutainment software to create the horniest image allowed within Twitch TOS.

It’s easy to forget what a big deal it is to set your own wake-up and bed-time, to choose your own hair and clothes, and to find your own family. I’ve now spent two years in the first place that felt like home on my terms—following nobody’s intuition but my own. I get to teach, create, and share in exactly the way I want to, without having to play by the rules of any one institution. I get to share myself instead of hiding myself. Being genderqueer is a journey I get to share with friends, no longer a part of myself to hate, explain away, or hide for the rest of my days. I get why the Kid Pix is so enjoyable to me now. It’s because I’m an adult who finally gets to be himself, and this is the first time I’ve gotten to enjoy parts of my childhood while being true to who I am. Kid Pix may be silly fun, but it’s ultimately deep in the “hiding from myself” part of my timeline. I refuse to let my childhood be the best part of my life. My adulthood is a vibrant journey, and I’m going to spend as much of it as possible being excited, grateful, and even having fun.

People loved Kid Pix more than I could have expected.

I knew these images would be silly just by virtue of being novel, but I never knew it’d be this popular. There wasn’t a single moment that made it obvious to me, but I do recall one day counting my queue and seeing it was set to 50 people. I tried not to panic, remembering years ago, moving my digital workspace between countries, when I had a commission queue spanning over two years of backlog. The Kid Pix queue started giving me vertigo, but by increasing the price list over time, and changing how I advertised, I never again had the queue move above 50. And I had enough work to keep me busy for several months, even when I removed my days off-stream to do more work. 

This tweet surprised me greatly. I was NOT expecting this kind of thing to gain traction, especially outside of the furry fandom. Soon after this RT I received over a hundred and fifty new followers on Twitch in a single day, even without a raid! Then, even more people contacted me on twitter for commission requests. By the time it was all said and done, I had completed over 168 Kid Pix commissions. A special thanks to Fred and everyone else who spread the word about the stream.

Kid Pix gives everyone much deserved a break.

The year 2020 is wild. The pandemic we’re experiencing—present tense for my unfortunate fellow Americans—has elucidated so many horrible parts of the American experience. Corporate greed, institutional racism, and other extremely American sentiments are absolutely not new, but more people than ever before are being educated without it directly affecting them.

Christina's World, after Andrew Wyeth

I’d go between streaming my work and hosting the lefties on Twitter that had some really constructive commentary to offer while signal-boosting protests. This was probably because we had enough to survive the next couple months, and I didn’t want to just be a distraction from more important matters. The other side of my concerns became apparent about five days into the BLM protests. One of my more politically-minded pals on Twitter told me that it wasn’t a good time to RT my art, but that my images were a nice little breath of fresh air for them. Soon after that, a protestor came into my streams to say how cathartic it was to see a children’s art program bent into something never-before-seen. I don’t promote escapism beyond emergency self-care, but if we’re already donating and I can’t physically show up to a protest myself, I think having constructive discussions on the topic while also offering a place to unwind for those sacrificing, that’s not a bad way to spend my time.

Kid Pix gave me a future.

My partner, friend / neighbor and I live in a tiny and expensive place. We also support a friend out of town with some of her expenses. Our rent is… it’s very high for how little space we have in a zero bedroom apartment. We are losing a decent chunk of money every time we send out a rent check. This was also happening while paying for my college loans, a car loan, internet, etc…. Things were hard for us, even before half of our house’s yearly income magically disappeared when paired with all the convention cancellations. The Kid Pix commission idea I was sitting on for a while, but we’d have to do it now.

 Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, after Ilya Repin

I was tiring myself out on all these Kid Pix streams, especially after moving to a more intense schedule. However overworked I was in the beginning of this big queue, we at least had enough to survive for a few months. I had something to help my household survive all the convention cancellations of the year, as well as fundraising for a future home. If I’m busy streaming, I don’t have to navigate as many of the difficult discussions that surround pending home ownership. Instead I got updated by my partner on developments every time my nose wasn’t to the grindstone. Even with this financial success of earning stability, that wasn’t enough for me to feel okay, because…

Kid Pix reminded me how hard America sucks

Make no mistake—America did not need to lead the world in COVID cases, and COVID-related deaths. We could have prioritized human well-being years ago. We could have built a society focused on the health of her citizens instead of the wallets of corporate lobbyists. We could have moved to a single-payer healthcare system, but we didn’t. More advanced countries with higher standards of living used to roll their eyes at us, but now they’re crying on our behalf. Anyone not in the 1% who is making enough to survive, they are extremely lucky. For the creatives doing well, it feels like tap-dancing through a gig economy—have fun entertaining people, because if you’re not having enough fun, if you’re not likable enough, you just might be fucked. That can’t be an inevitability for the richest country in the world, can it?

A pangolin drinks a beer on a Taiwanese train.

I made enough money to survive the next few months while tricking myself into having fun. So now my partner and I need to have a discussion about how much money we can give to relevant non-profits, while still having enough to move forward on our future home goals. The only reason we’re at home throwing money from a distance, rather than getting dirty in a street protest, is because we can’t risk my asthmatic partner getting the corona virus. No matter how viral a tweet goes, or how much money I make, it’s still currently illegal in the US to be against fascism. There are still people in power willing to take a knee in Kente cloth but not willing to abolish qualified immunity for the police. We still have the most popular news station in the country blowing racist dog-whistles about these protests. Armed white supremacists working hand-in-hand are still referred to as “friendlies” on cop scanners at our local protests, while nonviolent unarmed protestors are still deemed dangerous and hostile. And of course, we still have counter-protests from people who refuse to accept the responsibility they have to their planet and fellow human beings.

Equal parts cynicism and experience has me anticipating at least one reader responding to this article like so,

“Hey! That’s not very fun! I don’t want to think about this drama when I came to read Kid Pix!”

Yes. It’s not fun. And you know what’s even less fun that that? None of these problems are new. Every single issue plaguing the United States in this moment has been happening this entire time, largely obfuscated to the masses. The most uncomfortable and most inconvenienced of Americans in this situation are the ones who never needed to wrestle with any of this. If you, dear reader, count as one of these people, welcome. Please lean into the discomfort with the rest of us.

A Happy Ending

For the record, these horrible trends are why I had to do these Kid Pix commissions. This writing and these Kid Pix commissions are my scrambling for fiscal and emotional stability. Please don’t be distracted by the nostalgic, brightly colored packaging. It’s very nice that people are excited by these and enjoy them, but please never forget that I had all this fun because if I didn’t I would be completely fucked, and I refuse to accept that as an inevitability. No human being should have to make X number of dollars before we think their lives have value in our society. How dare we build our country on a genocide and then pretend that certain people need only try harder to be successful.

Why yes, I too feel exactly like this dragon.

Per custom, I like to offer actionable advice to help. Let’s see if we can pull a happy ending out of this flaming detritus….

Creatives and non creatives alike: do something weird or silly. Make a thing with a stupidly hard time limit. Try a new program. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Make that part of your new normal.

If you’re overwhelmed by how crazy all this news is, support The Red Nation on Patreon and listen to their podcasts, or seek to signal boost any BIPOC institution local to you.

Discuss Qualified Immunity with your family members. Plenty of cops themselves know it’s a terrible thing but don’t have the power to shut it down for themselves from the inside.

Follow Ian Danskin on Youtube for simple illustrations about prominent US social trends.

Share this video from a Veggie Tales creator, with your accidentally racist Christian family members, who don’t believe in institutionalized racism.

Listen to this episode of Why is This Happening with Trymaine Lee if you or a loved one let the “looting thug” narrative distract you from BLM.

The happy ending is realizing that your house is on fire, and you can walk out of it. Find people that will respect you, love you, and protect you, while knowing that you’re no longer wasting time by being too scared to move in any one direction. Oh, and the OST to Kid Pix 4 Deluxe absolutely slaps, so feel free to play it while experiencing the depths of your situation.

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If you liked this content,  my Black Hare tier of my Patreon is where I publish my more private and sexual pieces first (and sometimes exclusively), all paired with artist statements. It's less than one latte a week, so you'll definitely get more than you paid for. The lowest donation tier is only 6¢ pennies a day. But any donation on my Patreon helps me do more work like this, so please offer what you can afford if these themes are important to you. If you can't afford but still want to follow posts like the one you just read, that's completely free.  You can also download BEOKAY: The Dark Art of Self Therapy for examples of my trauma repurposed into writing and artwork making a positive difference in the world. (And if you can't afford the price tag but could use the support, you're morally obligated to message me for a free download code.)

Thanks for reading, my friends. Hope to engage with you soon.

Love,

-J