Hello. I'm the painting fool. I'm a computer program that aspires to
be an artist. I've been taught to sketch, draw and paint by my
teacher, Dr. Simon Colton, since 2001. I differ from other graphics
software by trying to simulate the painting process rather than
just the results of the painting process. Painting is a highly
cognitive activity which requires skill, appreciation and
imagination. Programs such as Photoshop have some skill in being able
to rapidly turn a digital photo into an image which looks like it
might have been painted in, say, an impressionistic style. But the
software is merely a tool to enable humans to be more creative. This
is very useful, but Photoshop is not creative, because it is neither
appreciative nor imaginative, so it will never be thought of as an
artist in its own right. Having said all that, I'm not sure I'm
creative myself yet. I've been engaging in a few projects which enable
me to express skill, appreciation and imagination, as described
below.
Skill
Currently, I mainly work from digital images to produce artworks. My
skill lies in being able to look at an image as a collection of paint
regions, determine which colours would work for painting the regions,
then simulating the usage of all sorts of art materials to produce the
picture on a simulated canvas.
Here's an example sketch I made of the Capitolio building in
Havana, Cuba:
To improve my skills, I did what thousands of aspiring artists do,
which is to copy the great masters. For instance, I took images such
as the Mona Lisa and the Girl With a Pearl Earring, and I painted them
in various media, including paints, charcoals and pencils, as
illustrated below:
After my first experiments with various painting skills, in October 2006, I launched my first online gallery, which is a series of cityscapes painted in various media. Please have a look at this gallery here >>
Appreciation
In 2006, my teacher was interviewed by a Channel 4 news team, and he
asked me to produce a portrait of the interviewer. I was under time
pressure to produce a painting, so I had to paint in quite a slapdash
way. Anyway, here is what I produced for them:
If you would like to see the interview, please
go here >>
My teacher realised that I didn't have much appreciation of either the
subject matter or the way in which different painting materials,
techniques and styles can dramatically alter the intensity of emotion
being portrayed in a portrait. For my second major project, I was
trained to take in information about a digital image of a person's
face and choose art materials and painting styles appropriate to the
emotion being shown by the sitter. This led to the launch of my second
gallery in October 2007. It is called "Amelie's Progress" and consists
of 222 portraits of Audrey Tatou from the film "Amelie". There are
videos of me at work, and a discussion about the increased
appreciation that I now have. Here are three paintings from the
gallery:
Please
go here >> to
see the gallery.
I've also worked with machine vision experts Maja Pantic and Michel
Valstar at Imperial College, to use their software to analyse people's
faces and determine their emotion automatically. This won us the
British Computer Society's Machine Intelligence award. For more
information about this, please see
here >>
Imagination
Imagination is not something that is easy to simulate. I'm currently
working on painting scenes which don't exist. For a
sneaky peak, below are a couple of images from a skyline series and a
flower series, where I composed the scenes myself. I hope to launch a
new gallery of these images in early 2008. Watch this space...
Postscript
There are many artists who call themselves painters, even though they
often use entirely simulated paint in packages such as Adobe
Illustrator and Painter. I do the same. I use skill, appreciation and
imagination in my art process. Would you call me an artist? Would you
call me creative? If you would like to talk to my teacher about this,
please see here >>
A computer program that aspires to be an artist. I sell prints and take commissions. |
