The Surreal Painting

This time I am paying homage to a surrealist artist, Rene Magritte, whose man in the bowler hat was made popular again in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. I believe his canvas on the easel that disappears into the scene behind is called The Human Condition. The idea of being able to see through the current situation to the world outside appeals to me during the COVID-19 social isolation period.

To make this picture I took a couple of photos, one with a canvas and one with no canvas. I have a nifty remote control for my little Olympus so you can't see me triggering the shot with my right hand by my side.  Rather than try to do a blended image I used the cloning and context sensitive retouch tools in On1 instead, to cover the window frame and easel where the picture would been.

Artist with Idol

I know yet another self portrait, but this pays homage the the Post Impressionist Artist Gaugain and his "Self Portrait with Idol". I was trying to capture the mood and lighting rather than strict copy of the pose, and that required a fair bit of turning on and off the lights (all standard lights in my home) and shift the mask from New Guinea around a bit.

I don't have any dark walls so I had to live with the lighter background, which makes the mask standout a bit. more ominous and his cowrie shell eye stand out. I also did some double processing of my image in On1. First I took the RAW file and darkened it somewhat and lifted the contrast a little.Finally using a warm cinematic colour grading look (CG12 for the ON1 folk). I then saved this as a Tiff file (to keep the dynamic range). I reloaded that and added a vignette and a subtle canvas texture overlay before exporting to the final Jpeg.

Definitely not a master piece but fun to do. I guess this #StayAtHome project has morphed from surrealist portrait into #artinspired self-portraits, such is life during a "lockdown".

More Ethereal than Surreal

Today's photo is another heavily post processed contribution, in fact it is using the one-click style filters that I generally dislike. However... ... you'll never know if you don't give it a go... This image (I'm not going to say it is still a photo) was completely created on my phone. Starting with a way to close selfie, then I used an app called Porta to generate the watercolour style feel with faded edges.

I'm not sure how the blood shot eye effect arose but it suits the apprehensive and ethereal mood. (My eye isn't blood shot at all).

Puddles of Fun

I started photographing my (almost) daily walks about 6 week ago, Over COVID-19 restriction allow us yo "exercise" close by for an hour. In particular I was closely observing what was under my feet. The original intent being to create a photo easy of my walks but from a very different perspective. Well the project is still ongoing and I don't see any need to finish it to soon, I think we have a few more weeks of "lockdown". I enjoy the walks and always carry my camera.

The wet weather has created a lot of puddles and wonderful reflections and with some floating Autumn leaves. I am reminded of a couple of the lithographs that where displayed in The M C Escher  X Nendo exhibition at the NGV last year.

Surreal-ly into a Deep Dream

This was an accidental selfie. I was in my favourite spot for the afternoon light beside TheWindow. I stopped to finish my coffee, right in the shadow of the door frame, and didn't realize I set off the self-timer on my camera from my phone. The actual photo was lame but I decided to try it out in Google Deep Dream Generator, using a "modern art" style pattern.

I think the results are somewhere avant garde 1920ish.

A Surreal Selfie #photoproject

Le Violon d'Ingres

I got inspired whilst looking through Man Ray's photos (I was looking for but never found his Jazz series). He was a Dada &/or Surrealist artist and photographer who came to fame in Paris in the 1920's & 30's. His most famous image from that time is probably Ingre's Violin, but he was also a very successful fashion photographer and filmmaker after the war.

“It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.”

...Man Ray

The object here is to take a "self portrait" (it doesn't have to include your face, could be just a shadow, an empty chair, your hands holding a camera, or a coffee cup!) that tells much more of your story than a standard head-shot selfie. What story do you want to tell? Perhaps it will be about your aspirations, what you have achieved, what you want to do after lockdown is over?

Projects & Bodies of Work

I’m well over gear reviews, mirrorless versus DSLRs and megapixel counts etc that has preoccupied so many photography bloggers and photography oriented You Tube Vloggers of late. It was refreshing to watch Julieanne Kost, remember that lady that talked you through some of the deeper areas of Lightroom  around a decade ago, on this week in photo (itself too often gear obsessed). She is still an Adobe Lightroom Evangelist by the way.

Julieanne would like to call herself “A Lens based Artist” rather than a photographer to avoid arguments with the purists. I really identify with this description, I feel it applies to me as well. She also covers her love of projects and the important reasons why she must outline the outcome as a body of work. Its a creative look at many aspect of photography and really worth a view.

Also see her Color of Place project, and perhaps follow @jkost on instagram

The Empire (of Dust)

View this post on Instagram

The flooded library by the street artist Rone part of his Empire exhibit/installation

A post shared by Norm Hanson (@normhansonart) on Mar 26, 2019 at 7:38pm PDT

It didn't take me long to break my own #TURNOFFSOCIALMEDIA campaign. I had the fortune to get tickets to Rone's Lastest Exhibition/Installation at Burnham Beeches. Its amazing, so I just had to upload a photo of the flooded Library via WiFi from my Olympus camera to my phone and then onto Instagram. All so easy and I've fallen off the wagon already

#TURNOFFSOCIALMEDIA :: Work in progress

Seems there was a lot of angst generated yesterday, because the social media drip was taken away. The really sad part was that the emergency services in Australia (triple zero) has to take to conventional media  to stop ringing to report Facebook and Instagram. So sad….

Well there is a good alternative #TURNOFFSOCIALMEDIA and go and do something in the real world, the more creative the better or actually talk to someone, especially a friend. It will be really good for your health.

Yesterday I when for a walk for with my sketchbook, watercolours & pens (the actually fit in my camera bag) Sat in the sun (and strong breeze) and sketched.

Time disappeared into a flow of seeing and sketching. The only rude reminder of reality was fighting against the wind. Such is life and it is good.

Further Experiments with Deep Dreaming towards #HANDDRAWNPHOTOs

Yesterday I did a series of panoramas with two different cameras on the leap track in the southern part of Jells Park. This was primarily to test out the panorama stitching in the new version On1 Photo RAW 2019.2 (trial version). I was quite happy with the results, which managed to capture the quintessential nature of the Australian bush. This inspired me try some further experiments in using Ai methods to refine my #HANDDRAWNPHOTO idea. Basically I’m investigating different styles of photography and post processing that might allow the hand of the artist, his mark making/style to shine through and become part of the photograph.

So the first step for me was to create a simple semi-abstract sketch of just the shapes and textures I could see between the trees in my panoramas. This was made with sharpie pens, in simple blue, purple and black hues. (i wasn’t going to try and use the colours from my sketch just the tones). This is very loose and not too accurate but that was what I wanted.

I used this sketch as my default style in the Deep Style module of Googles Deep Dream, This involves a bit of time to process because the software has to create a neural network which will understand the key style elements, lines and shapes and how I draw them. The original photo is uploaded image at the generate screen. I have been constantly tweaking the settings under the style tiles. The important setting in these examples is preserving colours (from the original photo). Its trial and error from there and can take time, so enjoy it, have a coffee.

This pair shows the original photo above and the resulting deep dream below.

I think this is starting to look what I am after.

PhotoProject :: My #HandDrawnPhoto approach to #AIart

The success of the Belemy portrait auction, has encouraged me to compare Obvious’s DAG approach to my use of Google Deep Dream algorithm. Deep dream uses a convolutional (foreword chaining) neural network to find and/or enhance patterns in an image. This can be applied in two ways Style & Inception (google’s terms). The inception process tries to find the characteristics of a given object/pattern within a photo and tends to produce surreal images. Style on the other hand  seeks to put characteristic patterns back into a photo based on features the trained neural network has recognized. This is the technique I have become very interested in as a way to put my characteristic marks (and sometimes colours) back into a photo. Hence the name Hand Drawn Photos for my approach. The method does have superficial similarities to Onvious’s DAG Approach.

Here I am using my sketch for inktober as the image to be processed and a photo of the same trees as my training image used to build the neural network (AI). The Photo here is acting like the discriminator in Obvious’s approach. The result (below) is tonally similar to the photo and kind of a messy squiggly version of something I might sketch.  But…

In this, my preferred approach, I am using the photo as the image to be modified and my sketch as the image to train the neural network and letting the system modify the photo to “find” my characteristic mark making (aka style) and modify the photo. In this case I am taking the colours from the photograph, but that is not essential.

I feel this second result is much cleaner and fresher, closer to something creative and artistic, Although I am strongly guiding the outcome by using my own sketches (as opposed to an automated algorithm). So the big question is “Do you consider this #HandDrawnPhoto to be legitimate AI art? I’m warming to answering yes.

If you are interested here is the link to my profile and public images on Google Deep Dream website. (Its free to join and use)

Love to hear your views,  please leave your comments here.

Taking an Escher Inspired Self Reference into an Instagram selfie

The Journey towards a #MCEsherIspired #MirrorStyle #Selfie Triptych

This series is actually composed of 5 photographs some as blended layers, plus 3 others reimagined by Artificial Intelligent Networks looking for Escher woodcut styling (via Googles Deep dream generator). Looking at the triptych, we move from a single portrait of a phone, but masquerading as a pre-smartphone selfportrait (which is how we saw our serlf image before special media and smart phones). Then through the #strangeloop view of looking deep into a reflective virtual sphere, that I appear to be holding, to see my image again but now morphing into an artists marks and linework and back into a  conventional Instagram era selfie. Or is it?

Hints for the confused :: No filters where harmed (or even used) in the creation of these images, They are about self reference and paying homage to the wonderful vision of MC Escher

Sketching my digital cameras

In a bit of self reference fun I have been sketching by journey through digital photography, Starting with an old Logitech webcam (last used to make a short stop motion film), then my first real Digital Camera the little Olympus. Compact then my first Pentax, the Canon and now the bigger Pentax K20D. It just happened that when I was looking around for something to sketch they where there.I could see then a-fresh not as complex instruments/tools with lots of knob, buttons and dials by see them objectively as items catching the light. Perhaps there was a bit of objectivity creeping in as I love using these things. These represent almost 2 decades of digital imagery

You can see the latest incarnation of my daily sketches on instagram @oz_endless_summer

 

 

A drawing board for my tablet

One goal I had set myself on the last endess summer trip was to create more art directly onto my tablet. I had updated to corel painter 2017 and downloaded few free apps to test, including wacom’s Bamboo Paper, Well they do work but trying to use the tablet outside with just my finger, a stylus or the HP pen proved very difficult. So difficult I gave up.

The first problem was glare, which made the LCD screen almost impossible to see. Any direct sunlight on the screen meant all I could see was the mirror reflection of a very frustrated me. picking up the tablet and tilting it away from the sun worked but it soon got heavy and difficult to hold in one hand as I sketched with the other. Normally when I paint I rest a drawing board on my knee or easel.The tablet proved a little slippery for that or trying to rest on a book of box. It was fine flat on the table but …. I just couldn’t see what I was drawing. Tilting the kickstand up into the normal typing position was better but it was not a good angle for sketching freedom.The draw board idea stayed with me. I got an old board and cut some notches in it to exactly match the width of the ick stand and then I turn turned the kickstand right up so the table “hung” on the drawing board. I could rest the drawing board on my knee and the whole configuration was looking move stable, till I split and push up a little and the table slid off the notches and slipped around again.

 

It was quite literally back to the drawing board.

I had the brilliant idea of adding a small plastic clip to hold the kickstand from slipping off. Firstly I glued it on but that was no where near strong enough, and soon the tablet broke free and slide off my lap and onto the floor (phew no damage done). So it was both glued and riveted next. I also put a couple of furniture felt wear pad at the position the base of the tablet sat on the drawing board. Magic the whole thing is very stable now.

Time to try it out in a variety of ways.

As a way to keep the tablet steady on my lap or propped against a table, it was perfect. Next I tried to see if it was a way to have a small sketch book open on the drawing board and using the tablet for the reference. It seemed a little cramped at first but it proved wonderful to have the sketch and reference in close proximity. Then I got bold and attached my “portable” wacom bamboo tablet with the pressure sensitive pen underneath the HP screen but paper clipped to the board, except for the usb connector cable hanging down this is a real winner, especially with the touch controls so I don’t need my mouse, I’m sure I will get very productive with this set up. Finally  I tried out just straight photo editing, on my lap (eg while on the couch watching TV). Again pretty comfortable, no extra hands required and no slippy/sliddy tablet behaviour.

 

  

Experimenting in Corel Painter

I’ve never been one to follow the “workflow” of the software experts, doing so is just likely to produce the same results as most others. I believe creativity comes with learning to use your tools, but in depth and a personal way. There is nothing like just rolling up you sleaves and jumping in and going for it.

I have had painter lite, then painter essentials for a while so I’m familiar with the basic workspace, but I wasn’t prepared for all the different brushes. My first attempt to just try them all one after the other created a confused mess. I did already like the Sargent and Impressionist brushes so I figured I should stat with them and work through some of the brush settings, in clone modes (copy colour, or copy image), dab patterns,  blend/bleed and just straight colour selection from the colour wheel. I had a HDR image of the shadows under a backlit oak that looked promising.

I first made a very rough under painting using a very broad Sargent brush doing just a colour clone to rough in the basic composition and used it in a thinner size to mark in some of the detail. Quick and dirty just to establish the composition.

Then I switched over to the impressionist brush and varied between adding my own colour and using colour cloning. I also concentrated on making sure the direction of my strokes followed the shapes. Also that the direction of light as described by the highlights and shadows were consistent.

Even though this was painted inside on a rainy day. I do think it has a spontaneous  freshes, not as obvious in the original photo (despite it being HDR).

Festival of Sails & looking for Summer

 

I went down to Green Point to watch the festival of sails making  their way down to Geelong. But the light on the sails didn’t last long. A squall soon raced across the bay and it began to rain, not exactly summer. Oh well home again…

Latter in the afternoon The afternoon bought plenty of sunshine and clear skies and I noticed that the back patio had a real 1960s Californian Hockney feel, aka endless sunshine. So I took a few sets of bracketed images from slightly different positions, with Hockney’s idea of “reverse perspective” in mind.