Two Dozen Classic Album Covers Rendered in MS Paint

Reproducing album covers in MS Paint isn’t exactly the world’s most original idea, but that doesn’t make it any less awesome. The good folks at Continuum’s 33 1/3 series tipped us off to this particularly extensive collection, the humble beginnings of which lie in message-board user contributions. From the collection’s Flickr page:

“The drawings in this collection were primarily made by various users in discussion forums on the websites ForeverDoomed.com and StonerRock.com. Using MS Paint, and other rudimentary computer drawing programs, users attempted to recreate their favorite album covers and sometimes let others on the forum guess the band and title from the artwork. Given that the websites are largely devoted to underground heavy metal bands, metal album covers form the largest percentage of the recreations (but are not the only albums included). While some users ‘cheated’ by using a tracing function in the program, most attempted to recreate the covers freehand with just a mouse or the touch pad on their laptops. Some gave themselves a limit of five minutes to recreate the most recognizable essentials.

In November 2010, StonerRock.com stopped hosting discussion forums and all old content was lost. This collection will continue to grow as I am sent or discover more images on other forums."

In the gallery below, we’ve compiled some of our favorites, but the entire set—at the time of this writing, there are 730 (!!!) album covers—is worth a look.

Click an image to see it full size. To move to the next image, click on the image or use the right arrow key.