Re:Show HN: Paint yourself in the style of classic art, in y...
by notahacker on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @09:06AM
(#15392096)
I think there's something of a human selection effect with the more impressive outputs they've opted to show; much as you can throw a far dumber algorithm at far less selective samples of Shakespeare and end up with the non-incoherent examples seeming wonderfully poetic
Take the example of the woman's face and Munch's The Scream. Ask an art student to pain a woman in the style of The Scream and you'll probably get her with a simplified, harrowed expression, surrounded by swirly waves and skies. Run this through the algorithm and you'll get a photograph of a woman's face with brushwork superimposed over it including a choppy, vibrant orange forehead instead of a choppy, vibrant orange sky. It's not particularly visually interesting and is obviously the work of a dumb algorithm[1]
On the other hand, I combined the woman's face with Picabia's Udnie and the results were very pleasing, especially the way the contrast of black and white and sharpened edges happened to emphasise the model's cheekbone structure and eyes, and it looks like something a human might draw and sell as an original semi-abstracted portrait (albeit something an art teacher setting the "draw her in the style of Picabia" assignment would probably still frown at and say they'd missed the point of the exercise in producing representative art and not really grasped Picabia's massing or shading either)
[1]And I'm sure it's not the first time I've critiqued computer generated art based on combining Munch's the Scream because it treats the top of the image as vivid orange sky regardless of what it actually is...
Take the example of the woman's face and Munch's The Scream. Ask an art student to pain a woman in the style of The Scream and you'll probably get her with a simplified, harrowed expression, surrounded by swirly waves and skies. Run this through the algorithm and you'll get a photograph of a woman's face with brushwork superimposed over it including a choppy, vibrant orange forehead instead of a choppy, vibrant orange sky. It's not particularly visually interesting and is obviously the work of a dumb algorithm[1]
On the other hand, I combined the woman's face with Picabia's Udnie and the results were very pleasing, especially the way the contrast of black and white and sharpened edges happened to emphasise the model's cheekbone structure and eyes, and it looks like something a human might draw and sell as an original semi-abstracted portrait (albeit something an art teacher setting the "draw her in the style of Picabia" assignment would probably still frown at and say they'd missed the point of the exercise in producing representative art and not really grasped Picabia's massing or shading either)
[1]And I'm sure it's not the first time I've critiqued computer generated art based on combining Munch's the Scream because it treats the top of the image as vivid orange sky regardless of what it actually is...