Text Driven Manipulation

Suppose an art director looked at one of your pieces and said "Great, but could you make it more goth?" 

You'd know what to do, right? How about taking a cat picture and making it more cute or changing a tiger into a lion?

Computers, using large data sets, can accomplish such manipulations. In the top row of each pair is the input image. Below that is the manipulation. The phrase is the text prompt used to drive the manipulation.

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See the scientific paper: StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery 

The Clock in Bryan, Texas

Downtown Clock, Bryan, Texas, gouache 

For this 45 minute gouache sketch I used ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow, burnt sienna, and white.

The Lap Box

Eugen Dücker 1841-1916 painted this portrait—possibly a self portrait—in 1900, showing a portable lap box rig used frequently by plein-air painters at the time.  

The artist sits on a tripod chair with a wooden box open and the painting pinned or propped on the inside of the lid. There also seems to be a white umbrella folded up on the ground next to him.

The arrangement has several disadvantages: you can't easily stand up or back up from the work; the size of the painting is governed by the size of the lid, and unless you have slots cut into the top frame there's no easy way to store wet paintings.  

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Read more about 19th-century plein-air painting methods in the book The Painted Sketch: American Impressions From Nature 1830-1880

How Do Our Brains Process Images—Decoding or Predicting?

For a long time, scientists believed that images were decoded in a bottom-up process.

It was thought that the image arrived on the retina and was sorted out in stages, starting with edges and shapes that were then assembled into recognizable objects, faces, or symbols by specialized areas of the brain.

You may recognize what this image represents just from the top of the picture; you may even guess who painted it.

Detail of portrait by John Singer Sargent

The alternate way of understanding visual perception is the top-down predictive model. This idea suggests that the brain contains a stockpile of representations of reality that it imposes on what you see. You don't really see reality directly; you see your brain's prediction of what's in front of you. 

According to neuroscientist Andy Clark, "the brain is essentially a prediction machine." 

Most scientists agree that these two systems interact at various stages. Bottom-up constructive image processing meets top-down prediction throughout the hierarchy of image decoding from the most basic to the most sophisticated. 

This process moves like greased lightning until you run across a prediction error or an ambiguity.

Green lines are equal. Source

Optical illusions present anomalies where the top down prediction comes into conflict with the bottom-up construction. Sometimes this conflict happens at relatively basic levels of processing, creating estimation errors of perspective, shape, or overlapping.

This skull illusion creates an ambiguity of interpretation at a higher level of interpretation. 

It's good for us as image makers to be aware of how our eyes and minds work as we decode the world around us and reconstruct it for the enjoyment of others.

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Read the science paper: Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science

Russian Edition of Imaginative Realism

Привет моим друзьям в России, спасибо. Это русское издание моей книги о живописи из воображения.

(Russian edition of my book Imaginative Realism)

200k on Instagram

 200k on Instagram! Thanks to everyone who follows me over there.

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This is my analog method for motion-graphic titles. 

Lighting Ratio

Setting up a maquette outdoors in the sunlight gives me clues about the placement of shadows and the lighting ratio. 

The term "lighting ratio" is defined as the comparison between the key light and the fill light. In outdoor sunlight, the key light is the sun and the fill light is the combination of the skylight and reflected sources. 

The higher the lighting ratio, the greater the contrast, and the lower the ratio the lesser the contrast. 

As I explain in my book "Color and Light," 

It’s easy to underestimate the tonal separation between the light side and the shadow side in sunlight. When lighting experts set up artificial lights for a movie shot, they call this separation the lighting ratio, and they usually try to reduce it to cancel the unflattering effect of harsh or dark shadows.

As artists we may want to do the same, depending on the feeling we want to create. But most often, beginning painters tend to ignore the dominance of direct illumination and play up secondary sources too much.

If you’re counting steps on a value scale from one to ten, you might typically see five steps of tone from sunlight to shadow, or two f-stops on a camera’s aperture setting. The separation would be reduced if there were high clouds, hazy atmosphere, or a light-colored ground surface.

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Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter is also available signed from my website.

Tutorial videos: How I Paint Dinosaurs and Tyrannosaurs: Behind the Art

Painting Spinosaurus

Spinosaurus was a dinosaur adapted to life at the water's edge, hunting for fish like a heron. 
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The maquette is set up in a plastic take-out dish, and the water is lightened with acrylic paint. 

The painting will be featured in the next issue of Ranger Rick magazine.

  

If you haven't seen it yet, here's the whole video that takes you behind the scenes. Link to YouTube video.

GUMROAD VIDEOS about dinosaur art: 

Tyrannosaurs: Behind the Art 

How I Paint Dinosaurs​ 

The Mammal That Ate Dinosaurs 

Australia's Age of Dinosaurs 

MATERIALS: 

Sculpey (Polymer clay: Sculpey) 

Magic Sculpt (Two-part epoxy clay)​ 

Model Magic (air dry sculpting material)​ 

Liquid Acrylic (transparent red oxide)​ 

Hot glue gun 

Illustration board 

John Singer Sargent at San Vigilio

When John Singer Sargent found a subject he liked, he often painted it from different angles in different media. In 1913, he was fascinated by the curved jetty on Lake Garda at San Vigilio in Italy. 

Above Lake Garda at San Vigilio, John Singer Sargent, 1913

This one shows the sailboat in the embrace of the jetty. It's painted in watercolor, with rich darks in the area of the boat and its reflection, and the light areas of the stone are kept uniformly light.

John Singer Sargent, Three Boats in Harbor, San Vigilio, 1913

In this oil, he includes two other boats and keeps them within a uniformly dark mass.

Here's an oil painting looking back toward the land from a high vantage point in the lake. I'm not sure how he got this angle, which would have to be from a boat, and from above the deck level of a small vessel.

John Sargent, San Vigilio. A Boat With Golden Sail, 

oil, 55.9 cm (22 in) x 71.1 cm (27.9 in)

One more oil painting shows a view back to the buildings around the harbor.

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Book: Sargent: The Masterworks

Painting Patagotitan

Patagotitan, oil on board, 10x13”. Maquette is epoxy clay. 

This sauropod is called Patagotitan, one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered. When I make a maquette I want to control the overall size and the relative proportions of the sculpt. 

To do that, I use a photocopier to enlarge the scientist’s skeleton drawing to the actual size I want to make the maquette. 

I take the maquette (with additional maquettes by David Krentz) outdoors and photograph them in actual sunlight. 

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The relative scale and quality of light and shadows will look right regardless of the size of the object. I move the little dinosaurs around like chess pieces on the rough piece of rock, which looks like the bank of a little pond at the edge of the forest.

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Watch the full video on YouTube

See the article in Ranger Rick Magazine

Amazon links: Model Magic, Magic Sculpt, acrylic.