Friday 31 July 2020

June and July Review

During the Covid Summer of 2020, I continued to push my drawings as far as I could through the software of the Internet.


ANIMATED STILL FIGURES



I try to think in 3D when I was learning to draw the figure with a pencil on 2D paper.  I would break the forms up into spinning shapes and perpendicular lines passing through the model.  The free 3D program Blender 2.8 allowed me to realize those spinning shapes and piercing lines as I imagine them.




I would like to see a drawing program, when one can draw on the screen while shapes spin in 3D.  Perhaps one could choose, spin and orient these shapes from a menu of primitives.



VORONOI STYLE

When I transfer the style of a Voronoi image to my figure drawing in Deep Dream Generator, it thickens up my pencil lines.  Using Photoshop Elements, I blend the result from Deep Dream Generator with my original figure drawing to get exactly what want.




I created two Voronoi images with this program,
and overlapped them in Photoshop Elements to create the image above.
I then transferred that image to my drawings





ONLINE ART PROGRAMS

There are a lot more free online art programs that will alter my drawings than when I last looked (about 2016).  Here are some examples below:









GITHUB PROGRAMS

I trolled GitHub (now owned by Microsoft) for art software, after I realized that a lot of these odd online art programs originated there.








Most of the GitHub programs generated interesting images that I could download and use as style references, to apply to my drawings in Deep Dream Generator.






PIFuHD

PIFuHD is a software demo program in Google's Colaboratory that will convert a 2D photo into a 3D object.  It did not work that well using my drawings, but it does work alright with frontal photos of people taken standing up.




AUTOMATED ART GENERATORS

There are a lot of programs that will generate art from scratch, sans artist, and I made a whole blog posting about many online automated art generators.


As an example, I started by downloading a person that does not exist, and uploading her to other online art generators.









DRAWINGS ALTERED IN 3D

I played around in Blender 2.8 to see how I could push my drawings into something different.  I noticed that I liked the 3D results that included a hand drawing, more than entirely computer generated 3D images.  I am fairly biased, but the computer images seem colder to me.








PAINTINGS

Peter Synek saved a lot of the paintings I was going to toss when I moved to Juarez in 2007.  I posted pictures of these salvaged paintings in June:







Then I used the old paintings as style references in Deep Dream Generator.  That is, I transferred the style of these paintings to some of my pencil drawings, and was fairly pleased with the results.








3D IN CROSSVIEW

It was easy to create a kind of 3D image in Photoshop Elements.  I made a stereoscopic pair of images by slightly shifting one image to the left or right from the other image.  When one overlaps these two images -- by crossing their eyes -- one figure will float over in front of the other.  

This is a tangible 3D illusion that happens in your head.



ONLINE MODELS

In addition to drawing online every Tuesday night with the Santa Fe Argos group, I also found a couple of websites that offered models to draw -- namely Croquis Cafe and Sketch Daily.






John Tollett made two videos about the drawings from the Santa Fe Tuesday Night Drawing group:



And the sequel:





DEEP DREAM GENERATOR
April Update

Deep Dream Generator upgraded their online AI program to deliver a higher resolution result.  I also played with the Settings, to get stronger  (and weaker) style transfers.




DOWNTOWN ALBUQUERQUE
A Covid Summer

Days after the July Art Walk in downtown Albuquerque, people started painting graffiti murals on the boarded up windows.  I documented the evolution on this blog.





ONLINE SOFTWARE
AND RESOURCES
From June and July



*Online Model References:





"A curated list of awesome projects, works, people, articles, and resource for creating art (including music) with machine learning."



*July 7, 2020






OTHER





*Other Online Interactive Art Programs



Deep Dream Generator -- Variations on warping strength

Google's Deep Dream Generator updated their program in April.  I noticed that the user can opt for stronger, or weaker style transfers.  Or he can pass over the Settings, and leave the medium default on, as it was before.



E X A M P L E   1


I transferred the style from an image I captured in Drawcode.


HIGH
Style Transfer



MEDIUM
Style Transfer



LOW
Style Transfer




E X A M P L E   2

I transfer the style of Alphonse Mucha image to one of my drawings:


HIGH
Style Transfer

High style transfer settings,
raw result

Settings for a strong style transfer


The result blended with the original
in Photoshop Elements



MEDIUM
Style Transfer

Medium style transfer settings,
raw result


Settings for a medium style transfer --
these are the program's default settings


The result blended with the original
in Photoshop Elements


LOW
Style Transfer

Low style transfer settings,
raw result



Settings for a low style transfer


The result blended with the original
in Photoshop Elements


Wednesday 29 July 2020

July 28, 2020

The Tuesday Night drawing group of Santa Fe drew together online using Zoom, because of the Covid 19 quarantine.








I bumped up the "style transfer" effect
in "Settings" in Deep Dream Generator