1-Bit Hokusai: Recreating The Great Wave on a Vintage Macintosh

An artist details a long-running personal project to redraw Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji as 1-bit pixel art on period-correct Macintosh hardware. The first piece shared publicly is The Great Wave off Kanagawa, rendered at the original 512x342 Mac screen resolution to preserve authenticity.

The work is produced on a Quadra 700 or PowerBook 100 running System 7, using Aldus SuperPaint 3.0, the same software the artist grew up with. The aesthetic deliberately echoes Susan Kare’s classic Mac iconography, particularly her ‘Japanese lady’ image that adorned MacPaint boxes.

The artist frames the constraints as both a flow-state exercise and a nostalgia trip, embracing the difficulty of fitting Hokusai’s compositions into a monochrome pixel grid. A 640x480 desktop pattern version is offered as a bonus download for fellow vintage Mac users.