Hadi Karimi used digital tools to imagine what classical composers might have looked like. He says:
"Beethoven is often portrayed as this heroic figure that resembles more of a Greek god than a human who dedicated his life to music. To reconstruct his face I only used his LIFE mask and also a bust that was made by the same person who made the mask. He also had a death mask, but due to his illness, he lost so much weight that the mask is almost useless for this purpose.
"Sculpted in ZBrush, the color texture was painted in Substance Painter, rendered in Maya with Arnold, used Xgen core for the hair."
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Vlaho Bukovac (Croatian, 1855-1922) said: "In nature, the sky is the lightest thing of all."
In 1938, Fleischer Studios produced this short documentary showing how they made animated cartoons.
The Florida-based studio that popularized Popeye and Betty Boop resembled the Disney process in using painted cels, but there were important differences, too. Fleischer innovated the rotating 3D backgrounds, and they typically recorded the character voices after the animation was completed.
At the YouTube channel Fabulous Fleischer Cartoons Restored they've got a lot of beautifully restored cartoons, and the Tested channel explored how the restoration process works.
My first idea was to paint Santa heroically standing on a rooftop next to a chimney with the elves showing him a map of the route.
Then I tried a bunch of other ideas, including supervising the elves' workshop and flying over the rooftops in his sleigh.
Image generated by computer from a text prompt
The field of text-to-image generative art has been drawing investor dollars, and has been growing at an impressive pace, with lots of startups creating services using Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Dall-E2 and ChatGPT. One notable investor newsletter called Antler has just released an introduction to the field and a map of what's out there.
Thoughts about Generative AI or AI Art
Questions from Ollie Forsyth of Antler Investments
1. What impact does Generative AI have on you as a creator?
Not much. I've tried Dall-E2, Stable Diffusion, and ChatGPT but the results for me always fall too far short of what I have in mind to create. I have very specific ideas in mind when I want to make a picture, and I get the best results and the most satisfaction from making my pictures with paint and brushes. I have always made my art with physical tools, and use digital tools for photography and video to document the process and the results.
Is this a good thing or is it going to have a negative impact on creators?
There's a lot of good about generative AI in art. For one thing, there has been a huge surge in appreciation for surrealism and fantasy, because that's what it does best. I've seen a lot of images that are new and exciting. The potentials of the medium are almost limitless. But it’s also scary and threatening, especially to digital artists who are part of corporate entertainment pipelines, such as concept artists.
2. What are your most pressing concerns about the platforms?
By "platforms" I assume you mean generative AI models, such as Midjourney, Dall-E 2, and Stable Diffusion. The ease of creating images means that there has been such a cascade of computer generated images and videos that they've glutted many arenas of the art world: portfolio sites, art print markets, contests, and freelance illustrators. This leads to a cheapening of all the images, a dulling of appreciation, and a confusion about what's really created by humans. How do you run an art school when the students can solve any assignment with the push of a button?
People who worry about the threat of AI art focus on the production side, but we shouldn't forget about the distribution side. How will people consume these images, films, and writing? Remember that the prompt doesn't have to come only from the artist, creator or director. It can also come directly from the consumer, acting as individuals or as fan groups.
Imagine an AI video-generator with personal biofeedback input that creates hallucinatory music or video to suit your current mood. Or let's suppose you have online groups who love Japanese anime style. Their preferences can shape the generation of every video they see. They can watch custom editions of their favorite media or games output with their favorite anime style. Or they can watch shorter or longer versions of films, or films customized for whatever language they speak.
If the viewer and the generative model drive the entire creative process, there's really no need for an "artist" or "director" at all. The idea that a work of art or film exists fixed in a single form at the moment of creation and then finds its audience may be a quaint idea that many of us will outgrow as a culture.
The other big concern is that all these models are based on existing, previously manifested styles of art and photography rather than on the direct human response to nature itself. Therefore it is, by definition, "mannerist." In terms of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, we're talking about the realm of firelit shadows in the cave wall, not the light of the sun itself. Maybe someone will invent ambulatory robots exploring the real world, but without such empirical input, this will always be a profound limitation.
3. How will you be using Generative AI platforms?
I won't condemn AI or vow never to use it, and I respect artists who choose to ally with computers to make art. This all didn't arrive out of the blue. Digital artists have been automating parts of their creative process for many years now, with 3D rendering, ray tracing, procedural effects, photobashing, etc. AI models have just moved the needle way beyond where it was.4. Where is all this headed? Please provide examples.
AI art draws upon the collective unconscious of human expression to generate something new. Laws will be passed and new businesses will be formed that will shape the evolution. We will come to enjoy art forms that we can't currently imagine. Those forms may take market share away from traditional forms, just as the introduction of television took away from magazines and movies.
Swedish wildlife painter Bruno Liljefors said that in order to be successful at painting animals, an artist must have:
1. A love of nature and animals.
2. Great powers of observation.
3. The memory of a horse.
That last note needs some explanation, because it may translate better as a "long, deep, memory."
Why do the tones seem so different?
1. They have soft edges, and soft edges usually belong to shadows.
2. Those edges are parallel, and cast shadows from the sun on flat surface are parallel.
3. The tones of adjacent colored squares shift gradually in value to an equal degree, just the way shadows do.
JoaquÃn Sorolla (1863-1923) on Wikipedia
Now there's a free exhibition of original art by Caroline Clowes on view at the Samuel Morse estate in Poughkeepsie, New York through December 30, 2022.
Here's a video with more information.
| "Birthday Pageant" from the book Dinotopia: The World Beneath, Oil on canvas mounted to panel Birthday Pageant print |
What would it feel like for a helicopter to drop a boat into the sea during a raging storm?
The title is "Hurricane Claude," a novelette by Hilbert Schenck, published in 1983 by Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine.
In 2020, at the height of the pandemic experience, I painted my wife shopping at the market.
"While he was teaching his girls at home, at the table, Vlaho Bukovac (Croatian, 1855-1922) used every piece of paper, newspaper and book to make sketches on. When the last piece of paper in sight had been used up, Bukovac would calmly continue, drawing on the napkins, tablecloth, everything that was white and could take the mark of a pencil. He most of all hated to have to interrupt his work, even to the extent of having to get up and look for a piece of paper."
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Vlaho Bukovac on Wikipedia
Quoted from the book Vlaho Bukovac: A Cosmopolitan Croatian
