I teach digital painting, and Procreate is slowly becoming my enemy. I fully appreciate its ease of use, its fantastic union with Apple Pen and certainly my students love it. But doing design/creative work on a small screen is not healthy, especially for complex images. neither is it easy to maintain a complex workflow, such as that required by matt painting and multi-layer compositing. Also, any presence of tablets in a design teaching lab is never pretty... I can't easily review their files or integrate their output into a pro desktop app.
Cost is likely another big reason it’s popular with students. A $13 one time purchase is hard to beat… even with edu pricing Adobe CC quickly gets more expensive. Clip Studio Paint falls somewhere in the middle.
One thing Blender lacks is easy 3D texture painting. As far as I know, neither is there a decent 3D texture painting iPad app. Definitely a gap in the market.
Yes… I have seen this before and played with it. This was a good attempt at emulating the behavior of an app like Substance Painter. However… the core problem is that in order to paint textures you need very complex and deep functionality. When using Substance, I have to variously consider: the texture channels (e.g. color, roughness etc), the many layers that may serve these channels, the baked texture channels (e.g. ambient occlusion, normals etc), the many blend modes, masks and adjustments that serve and interconnect all these.
I doubt that anything other than native blender functionality could serve all this with any elegance.
I teach substance painter and it does a good job and hiding all this complexity until you need it. It is very common for students to underestimate it as an app… to view it as just photoshop for 3D.
Yes. And you can paint textures too with Procreate. But like a said, not as advanced as Substance painter and others. It might still be enough for some use cases.
I run the risk of being downvoted on this issue, but there is a personality type associated with downs syndrome. My experience of living in a community of down syndrome young people certainly supported this, but there has also been quite a bit of research on the matter... search Google Scholar and you will see a ton. In brief: very social, positive minded and very creative. Importantly, this seemed not to be effected by puberty, unlike the autistic kids I have known. The year I spent in there company was a gift.
Edit: user smeej has cited a few papers on this matter.
For a fun example of what the author describes as ‘boil’ in an animated line, check out the animation series ‘Baman and Piderman’. Lots of episodes on YouTube.
For visual art I feel that the existing approaches in context engineering are very much lacking. An Ai understands well enough such simple things as content (bird, dog, owl etc), color (blue green etc) and has a fair understanding of foreground/background. However, the really important stuff is not addressed.
For example: in form, things like negative shape and overlap. In color contrast things like Ratio contrast and dynamic range contrast. Or how manipulating neighboring regional contrast produces tone wrap. I could go on.
One reason for this state of affairs is that artists and designers lack the consistent terminology to describe what they are doing (though this does not stop them from operating at a high level). Indeed, many of the terms I have used here we (my colleagues and I) had to invent ourselves. I would love to work with an AI guru to address this developing problem.
> artists and designers lack the consistent terminology to describe what they are doing
I don't think they do. It may not be completely consistent, but open any art book and you find the same thing being explained again and again. Just for drawing humans, you will find emphasis on the skeleton and muscle volume for forms and poses, planes (especially the head) for values and shadows, some abstract things like stability and line weight, and some more concrete things like foreshortening.
Several books and course have gone over those concepts. They are not difficult to explain, they are just difficult to master. That's because you have to apply judgement for every single line or brush stroke deciding which factors matter most and if you even want to do the stroke. Then there's the whole hand eye coordination.
So unless you can solve judgement (which styles derive from), there's not a lot of hope there.
ADDENDUM
And when you do a study of another's work, it's not copying the data, extracting colors, or comparing labels,... It's just studying judgement. You know the complete formula from which a more basic version is being used for the work, and you only want to know the parameters. Whereas machine training is mostly going for the wrong formula with completely different variables.
I concur that there is, on some matters, a general agreement in art books. However, certainly it does not help that there is so much inconsistency of terminology. For example: the way that hue and color are so frequently used interchangeably, likewise lightness, brightness, tone and value.
What bothers me more is that so much truly important material is not being addressed as explicitly as it should be. For example: the exaggeration of contrast on which so much art relies exists in two dimensions: increase of difference and decrease of difference.
This application of contrast/affinity is a general principle that runs through the entirety of art. Indeed, I demonstrate it to my students by showing its application in Korean TV dramas. The only explicit mention I can find of this in art literature is in the work of Ruskin, nearly 200 years ago!
Even worse is that so much very important material is not being addressed at all. For example, a common device that painters employ is to configure the neighboring regional contrast of a form can be light against dark on one edge and dark against light on the opposing edge. In figurative paintings and in classic portrait photography this device is almost ubiquitous, yet as far as I am able to determine no one has named it or even written about it. We were obliged to name it ourselves (tone wrap).
> They are not difficult to explain, they are just difficult to master.
Completely agree that they can be difficult to master. However, a thing cannot be satisfactorily explained unless there is consistent (or even existent) terminology for that thing.
> So unless you can solve judgement (which styles derive from)
> For example, a common device that painters employ is to configure the neighboring regional contrast of a form can be light against dark on one edge and dark against light on the opposing edge.
I'm not fully sure of what you means. If we take the following example, are you talking about the neck and the collar of the girl?
To keep it short, there's no line in reality. So while you can use them when sketching, they are pretty crude, kinda like a piano with only 2 keys. The best thing is edges, meaning the delimitation between two contrasting area. If you're doing grayscale, your areas are values (light and shadow) and it's pretty easy. Once you add color, there's more dimension to play with and it became very difficult (warm and cold color, atmospheric colors, brush stroke that gives the illusion of details,...).
Again, this falls under the things that are easy to explain, but take a while to be able to observe it and longer to reproduce it.
There's a book called "Color and Light" by James Gurney that goes in depth about all of these. There's a lot of parameters that goes inside a brush stroke in a specific area of a painting.
Rembrandt was an avid user of this technique. In his portraits, one little trick he almost always used was to ensure that there was no edge contrast whatsoever in at least one region, usually located near the bottom of the figure. This served to blend the figure into the background and avoid the flat effect that would have happened had he not used it. In class I call this 'edge loss'. An equivalent in drawing is the notion of 'open lines' whereby silhouette lines are deliberately left open at select points.
> I think the name of the concept is "edge control" (not really original). You can find some explanation here.
I am aware of the term 'edge control' though I have not heard it used in this context. I feel that the term is too general to describe what is happening in the (so-called) tone wrap.
To extend the principle, wrap is an important concept in spatial rendering (painting, photography, filmmaking etc) and is a cousin of overlap. Simply... both serve to enhance form.
> To keep it short, there's no line in reality.
True that. I learned a lot about lines from reading about non-photorealistic rendering in 3D. There are some great papers on this subject (below) though I feel there is still work to be done.
Cole, Forrester, et al. "How well do line drawings depict shape?." ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 papers. 2009. 1-9.
Cole, Forrester, et al. "Where do people draw lines?." ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 papers. 2008. 1-11.
> There's a book called "Color and Light" by James Gurney that goes in depth about all of these. There's a lot of parameters that goes inside a brush stroke in a specific area of a painting.
Looking at it now. Any writer who references the Hudson River School is a friend of mine.
The thing that bothers me about this trend is that, for the most part, only details of paintings are used. To me, a cropped detail never looks complete. It is like a book missing half its chapters.
“I intentionally avoided showing the full crop to keep a sense of mystery,” Siripant wrote in an email. “Publishers often favor this approach so readers can envision the character in their own way.”
> especially since there’s no real science or theory behind it (that I know of).
The literature on hue harmony is fuzzy, but there are a few gems.
Check out Matsuda [1] who tracked the colors of what his female students were wearing, and tried to identify any principles informing their color choice. My criticism of him is that he plotted hue distribution on the RGB color wheel. The RYB wheel would have been a far better choice. His paper is in Japanese, but is summarized in multiple places. Below [2] is a link to 2 pages from a lecture I gave which summarizes his findings.
I'm sure you also know of Kuehni's classic tome on color spaces [3]. A fun and informative read.
There has been no research on hue antagonism (which is the idea that underpins complementary pairs). This is crazy, as it would be a very easy subject to investigate. To me it is obvious that there is a special relationship between antagonistic pairs above the fact that they mix to neutral. Supporting this is the fact that Leondro DaVinci documented this relationship even before hue circle was invented [4]!
As for the mystical dimension of color harmony... this has been assumed since the dawn of color science. Newton himself believed that there was seven colors in his hue circle for no other reason than this was a spiritually significant value [5]. Itten [6], Goethe [7] and Kandinsky [8] all absolutely believed in the spiritual dimension of color. Personally, I believe that their work has had nothing but a destructive impact on how artists and designers use color. It is wildly inconsistent, vague and often plain wrong.
[1] Matsuda: Color Design. Asakura Shoten (in Japanese). (1995)
My process was honestly a lot of: “oh, that looks good.” That’s what I meant by “not backed by science” — I didn’t even try to base it on color theory.
Thanks so much for the treasure trove of references — can’t wait to sink my teeth into it!
I will reserve judgement on this for the simple fact is that att conservation has been responsible for a huge amount of Art vandalism.
The 'restoration' of the cistine chapel ceiling was funded by a Japanese tv company. The cheapest approach was chosen which assumed that michelangelo made absolutely no corrections to his fresco using applied paint. It is perfectly obvious that this was a mistaken assumption, in the process removing many of the artists original work. I can upload some slides later if anyone is interested.
In victorian times many classic sculptures were scrubbed of their original paint and their stonework bleached, just in order to serve the tastes of the time.
And let us not forget that modern conservators will add or remove elements according to the clients taste. Eg change the flag of a ship from British to American.
In that case they explicitly says that the process is non destructive and reversible. Essentially a wrap over the original artwork
> The restoration is printed on a very thin polymer film, in the form of a mask that can be aligned and adhered to an original painting. It can also be easily removed. Kachkine says that a digital file of the mask can be stored and referred to by future conservators, to see exactly what changes were made to restore the original painting.
I wonder whether it's still worthwhile to replaced a yellowed varnish varnish on old painting, just to be sure that it doesn't degrade further (with the assumption that historical varnish are somewhat lesser than modern one, which I really don't know if it's the case).
> I wonder whether it's still worthwhile to replaced a yellowed varnish varnish on old painting, just to be sure that it doesn't degrade further (with the assumption that historical varnish are somewhat lesser than modern one, which I really don't know if it's the case).
I would say that we should just live with the difference. There is a near guarantee that our experience of paintings as they exist today will always be significantly different to how they would have been experienced when they had been made, regardless of what we do. The factors are:
- Yellowing of oil/pigment/varnish. This is pretty much inevitable, even in modern paints.
- Fugitive colors. Most high-color pigments tended to fade significantly over time. Degas was once seen crying in front of a Delacroix, upset at how badly the colors had faded, even in his lifetime (It might have been Manet... can't locate the relevant anecdote online).
- Excessive varnishing. It used to be so that paintings received regular varnishing by their owners. Over time, the layers of varnish would build up to a ridiculous degree.
- Lighting. For me this is probably the most annoying factor. A general rule is that paintings should be lighted in the same light that they were painted. The values go to hell if a painting is lighted too brightly. There are many so-called hanging experts, who always light too strongly, even in respected national collections.
Semi-related anecdote: The first time I went to the Rodin museum I was struck by how badly one of the busts had been lighted. Whilst the guards were not looking, I moved it to a more agreeable position. I came back one year later to find it was still in that position.
As for using modern varnishes... I am not expert, but AFAIK one factor that accounts for the amazing longevity of old paintings was the compatibility between their many layers. The canvas, the primer, the paint and the medium were all derived from the same plant: flax. On top of that would sometimes be laid stand oil, again derived from flax. If this continuity is broken, all manner of problems might arise, most of which would be long term issues such as cracking and flaking.
> AFAIK one factor that accounts for the amazing longevity of old paintings was the compatibility between their many layers. The canvas, the primer, the paint and the medium were all derived from the same plant: flax.
AFAIK that's largely untrue in the general case:
- Canvas painting only appeared in the 15th century, and took a while to spread, paintings before the 17th century (16th in some locations) tend to be on wood panels e.g. raphael and da vinci painted almost exclusively on board.
- Canvas is almost always coated with gesso which at the time would use rabbitskin glue as binder, no flax there.
- While flaxseed was the most common drying oil (in europe), walnut, poppyseed, and safflower, were also in use. And additives were usually mixed in to manage the viscosity of the paint, so even in the "best" case it's not like the paint would be just pigments in linseed oil unless it's a very early oil painting, which wouldn't have been on canvas.
- As for varnishes, not only was flax not the only drying oil for oil varnishes, varnishes could also be "spirit" varnishes (with a resin dissolved into a solvent like alcohol or turpentine), waxes were also sometimes used as or in varnishes.
True… what I said only applies to canvas paintings. I should have made that clear.
The longevity of murals is easy to account for: the paint is applied to wet plaster, in that way becoming part of the wall. That is why the murals of Pompeii survived.
> Canvas is almost always coated with gesso which at the time would use rabbitskin glue as binder, no flax there.
You are right about the rabbit skin glue, but wrong about the gesso. As I recal, traditional Gesso is a mix of glue plus titanium white powder and is very brittle, generally unsuited to a flexible support such as canvas. A canvas painter would more likely use something flexible like a mix of pigment and rabbit skin glue, or pigment and egg protein or pigment and oil.
I thank god for modern primers. Using modern primers, I can prime a canvas in two days. An oil based oil primer could take months to dry.
As far as I can tell, the ingredients described by Cennini[1] is close to the “traditional” preparation:
* Gypsum (Hydrated calcium sulfate)
* Zinc white pigment
* Clean tap water or distilled water
* Rabbit skin glue
—-
[1] Cennini, Cennino d'Andrea, The Craftsman's Handbook "Il Libro dell Arte," Daniel V. Thompson, Jr., trans. (New York: Dover Publications, 1960) pp. 69–74.
> Semi-related anecdote: The first time I went to the Rodin museum I was struck by how badly one of the busts had been lighted. Whilst the guards were not looking, I moved it to a more agreeable position. I came back one year later to find it was still in that position.
A very funny video. Thanks. I will keep it as it beautifully demonstrates the waterfall of mistakes that often follow a minor change to a painting's composition.
Another anecdote: I was once photographing a painting in a museum gallery that did not encourage Phtography. Unfortunately, the light was causing excessive glare. Whilst the guards were not looking, we placed a cigarette package out of view under the frame to lift it away from the glare. Again... upon return many months later the cigarette package was still there.
I should state that this was a very provisional museum. It had recently been painted, and there were drops of paint of the frames showing that the paintings had not been removed during the painting.
I would assume the mask only covers the damaged areas. This means it replaces manual retouching, so you still need to clean the original painting and remove the varnish in order to get at the original colors, and as part of the usual cleanups (removal of old conservation, stabilisation, infill). The article specifically says that the film is adhered to and via a varnish layer.
Makes me wonder how it would handle heavy impasto tho.
Obviously it can't handle heavy impasto. With heavy impasto, people usually literally sculp the surface using some material to math the rest of the painting and then paint on top of this. Even with minimal impasto, they will often try to mimic the texture by imprinting various tools into the material, mimicking for example brushes used by the original author. This printing method can't do this at all, and the filter might struggle when the painting is too uneven.
Otherwise this might be an interesting technique, if the result can match the color and texture of paint perfectly. I can see it being used for some low priority paintings. There are much more paintinga that need restoration than people with necessary skills, so this could save of them, as it will be more viable to fix them. The infilling is usually just a small part of the entire process, but usually the most difficult wrt how skillful the conservator must be. You must be able to match colors and style perfectly, and there are huge differences in how fast this process is depending on the skills of the painter.
The relevant slides are on pages 16 to 19. Though I don't explicitly state it, most of the key changes Michelangelo made to his fresco were to its neighboring regional contrast. This is defined here:
As you might guess, neighboring regional contrast acts upon neighboring regions. Artists manipulate this property to produce tone wrap, which heightens the impression of form. Tone wrap is also defined in the preceding link.
Additionally, all Michelangelo's glazes were also removed. These would have had a significant impact on the global unity of his composition. I can barely look at photos of the Cistine Chapel taken after the restoration.
I having trouble activity listening to music, but I remember as a teen listening to it with a freind and laughing together at its musical wit. Both of us were deep into punk at the time (the Clash), and we had stumbled across this by accident. Rarely have I felt such empathy with a composer…. At once sad, funny and erudite.
> Establish peer review as the metric of tenure and make dam sure those peers know their stuff.
And you are back at square one: peer reviews become the currency used in academic politics. A relatively small group of tenured academics have all the incentives to independently form a fiefdom. Anonymization does not help as everyone knows work and papers of the rest anyway.
The supply of knowledgeable and conscientious reviewers in, say, machine learning, is far outmatched by the number of papers less knowledgeable and conscientious people submit.
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