Fine arts edutainment: the amateur painter

A new scheme for painterly rendering (NPR) has been developed. This scheme is based on visual perception, in particular themulti-scale line/edge representation in the visual cortex. The Amateur Painter (TAP) is the user interface on top of the rendering scheme. It allows to (semi)automatically create paintings from photographs, with different types of brush strokes and colour manipulations. In contrast to similar painting tools, TAP has a set of menus that reflects the procedure followed by a normal painter. In addition, menus and options have been designed such that they are very intuitive, avoiding a jungle of sub-menus with options from image processing that children and laymen do not understand. Our goal is to create a tool that is extremely easy to use, with the possibility that the user becomes interested in painting techniques, styles, and fine arts in general

Perceptual 3D rendering based on principles of analytical cubism

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Cubism, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, was a breakthrough in art, influencing artists to abandon existing traditions. In this paper, we present a novel approach for cubist rendering of 3D synthetic environments. Rather than merely imitating cubist paintings, we apply the main principles of analytical cubism to 3D graphics rendering. In this respect, we develop a new cubist camera providing an extended view, and a perceptually based spatial imprecision technique that keeps the important regions of the scene within a certain area of the output. Additionally, several methods to provide a painterly style are applied. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our extending view method by comparing the visible face counts in the images rendered by the cubist camera model and the traditional perspective camera. Besides, we give an overall discussion of final results and apply user tests in which users compare our results very well with analytical cubist paintings but not synthetic cubist paintings. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

A comparison of two methods for teaching art and their influences on students\u27 creativity

In 1984, the Getty Center for Education in the Arts initiated a program called Discipline Based Art Education (DBAE), which offered new criteria for teaching art. The basic aim of DBAE was to introduce additional disciplines into an art education program, with an emphasis placed on the teaching of art history, art criticism and aesthetics. To date, no true supportive data has been found substantiating the effectiveness of the DBAE program. The purpose of this thesis was to examine two different methods of teaching art and their impact on students\u27 artistic learning. Two intact fifth grade classes participated in a three month study. Each class received one weekly forty-minute art class, during which time, a series of four projects were created. The experimental group received instruction with a child-centered, hands-on approach while the control group received instruction with a DBAE format. Pretests and posttests, which consisted of creating landscapes, were administered to determine growth in the students\u27 artistic learning. Two art teachers rated the students\u27 pretests and posttests using a teacher-made rating scale. The researcher failed to find a statistical difference between the control and experimental groups

Infrastructure

The paintings in this series depict sensations and forms drawn from a collaged, painted surface, referencing examples of painting from the Early Renaissance and the pure Formalism of the mid 20th century. Collage materials lend both conceptual and physical directions to the compositions, in that it is symbolic of the multi layered experience of modern people in a technological society. Imitating painting’s gestural, linear energy in an illusory manner, the paper and paint layers invert expected hierarchies of space. I am analyzing the condition of the painter, the ideas of painting as an activity and product, with myself at the center as ‘producer’, exposing not only substrate, but also methodology, through varied paint applications. The act of making the painting is a self-reflexive exercise meant to cause the viewer to reflect upon their own act of looking, questioning the relationship between presentation and understanding. Although each object begins with traditional paint application, I quickly move to experimental modes of craft to explore compositional juxtapositions that arise in process allowing my work to evolve independent of the historic source material. Following the development of the base surface, the collage elements are applied and using both actual collage and implied collage I arrive at the specific balance between ambiguous forms and space. The edge of the panel is used as a boundary in order to reassert the painting’s formal and physical properties, like the exposed wood grain, but what is contained is equal to what is omitted. Both the eccentric edges and the palettes of many of the objects are inspired by historic models. The science of architectural perspective and color scheme also become part of the vocabulary of the painting reflecting atmosphere or clarity, in either concept or reality. I am always conscious of my use of space and the forms interacting inside as a reflection of the peculiar intersection of people and technology I observe everyday. Is the availability of communication technology adversely affecting our actual interactions? This work is intended to communicate this collapsed experience of the real and the virtual and provoke an awareness in the viewer

The material image: Artists’ approaches to reproducing texture in art

Since the introduction of computers, there has been a desire to improve the appearance of computer-generated objects in virtual spaces and to display the objects within complex scenes exactly as they appear in reality. This is a straightforward process for artists who through the medium of paint or silver halide are able to directly observe from nature and interpret and capture the world in a highly convincing way. However for computer generated images, the process is more complex, computers have no capability to compare whether the rendering looks right or wrong—only humans can make the final subjective decision. The evolving question is: what are the elements of paintings and drawings produced by artists that capture the qualities, texture, grain, reflection, translucency and absorption of a material, that through the application of coloured brush marks, demonstrate a convincing likeness of the material qualities of e.g.wood, metal, glass and fabric? This paper considers the relationship between texture, objects and artists’ approaches to reproducing texture in art. However texture is problematic as our visual system is able to discriminate the difference between natural and patterned texture, and incorrectly rendered surfaces can hinder understanding. Furthermore to render surfaces with no discernible pattern structure that comprises unlimited variations can result, as demonstrated by the computer generated rendering, in exceptionally large file sizes. The paper explores the relationship between imaging, artists’ approaches to reproducing representations of the attributes of material qualities, the fluid dynamics of a painterly mark, and 2.5D relief in printing. The objective is not to reproduce existing paintings or prints, but to build the surface using a deposition of pigments, paints and inks that explores the relationship between image and surface

Depicting Stylized Materials with Vector Shade Trees

International audienceVector graphics represent images with compact, editable and scalable primitives. Skillful vector artists employ these primitives to produce vivid depictions of material appearance and lighting. However, such stylized imagery often requires building complex multi-layered combinations of colored fills and gradient meshes. We facilitate this task by introducing vector shade trees that bring to vector graphics the flexibility of modular shading representations as known in the 3D rendering community. In contrast to traditional shade trees that combine pixel and vertex shaders, our shade nodes encapsulate the creation and blending of vector primitives that vector artists routinely use. We propose a set of basic shade nodes that we design to respect the traditional guidelines on material depiction described in drawing books and tutorials. We integrate our representation as an Adobe Illustrator plug-in that allows even inexperienced users to take a line drawing, apply a few clicks and obtain a fully colored illustration. More experienced artists can easily refine the illustration, adding more details and visual features, while using all the vector drawing tools they are already familiar with. We demonstrate the power of our representation by quickly generating illustrations of complex objects and materials

Procedural Generation and Rendering of Trees and Landscapes in the Style of Eyvind Earle

In this thesis I develop methods of generating digital 3D landscapes in the style of the artist, Eyvind Earle, who is perhaps most well-known for his art direction and background paintings on Sleeping Beauty. I develop a variety of trees and other terrain elements, each tailored to match the graphic shapes and rendered accordingly to match the style of reference artwork. Creation of both terrain and trees can be highly generative in nature – complex in a way that lends to being defined by a logical systematic approach. I provide procedural methods for matching the shapes of the objects, relying on noise, L-systems, and other constraints. In general, the process is divided into base geometry generation and shading details. Shading methods include simple custom shaders and geometry-based stippling and linework. The various systems are implemented in Side Effects Software’s Houdini as its procedural capabilities allows the creation of many scenes with the same tools