pied-billed grebe: painting on left, photo on right
This is my first-ever Photoshop drawing, which I’m working on as an exercise. I’m using a Wacom tablet and one brush tool. The painting and colors are from scratch; I’m not working on top of the photo or picking up colors from it. I’m just using CS4 as a simple drawing medium. I probably won’t work on it until it is indistinguishable from the photo, but I have a feeling I could if I wanted to.
Ngogngogngogngogngogngog!(eyes pop from head, tongue unrolls to floor)
Certs is a candy mint. Certs is a breath mint.
So what we (as viewers) are left with, and it’s really cruel and quite perverse, is looking down the infinite chasm of minutae in which one compares the teeny tiny ways one side is different from the other. Here’s a smidge, there’s a wee stroke. This truly is art of the Uncanny Valley, at least showing both together.You HAVE to go the whole 9 yards, the complete enchilada. Yes, it’s sick, but soooooooo satisfying.
Mark
I love that you tagged the post ‘Birds, Futility’ (yes I am paying attention).
And I love the drawing. It is totally sick. the drawing is so close to the photo, but yet it has an odd, animation-like sheen. cool!
so Here’s the real question. In a medium that was originally designed to manipulate photographs, i.e. turn them into simulations of painting or collage, etc. what place does the “hand” have when a competent photoshop expert could probably obtain similar results within half the time frame. Is the “painted” Grebe any better than the manipulated photoshopped landscape that “looks” painted. Granted, you come closer to “God” when you can feel the hand of the artist, but the medium convolutes the message. No longer are we seeing sensitivites of surface qualities undulate on a canvas in a physical way, but we are now, in remembering that quality, assimilating the experience in a digital gesture. Is this a futile effort or has Catherine given us the opportunity to expand our ability to “read” the poetry of images by bringing us closer to the “original” through a medium that is designed for multiples? i look forward to this thread….
(trying for the obtuse language prize) Thanks Mark.
Hi. The drawing is lovely. When you say you drew it from scratch do you mean freehand? Or did you follow the lines of the photo. I’m just trying to understand your process. THX.
I drew it freehand, looking at the photo as a reference.
That is very simply FANTASTIC. It really took me several looks to convince myself that the one on the left is freehand art and not simply a good use of the supplied photoshop filters. It’s not that I don’t believe you, it’s that the work is so well done!
Wonderful!
Pretty darned amazing…
Catherine’s perverse exercise of an electronically assisted simulcrum of a previously edited representation of an Helldiver, and our subsequent viewing of this exercise through electronics devices that further manipuate the image (PCs), begs the question: what would android art be like? Of course it depends on the android.
SEE: ROY BATTY, “Blade Runner”; DATA, “Star Trek: The Next Generation”; BIZARRO, “Superman Comics”; the homunculoid menegerie in Bride of Frankenstein;
And don’t get me going on the conversations this will start on what kind of art people like!
“More human than human” is our motto.
Mark, conflating epistemology and ontology as always. Duh!
It’s funny, though, because it could be seriously argued that there is no point to making something like this. I could have used filters and color sampling to the same effect, even added distortions to produce the proportional differences, and accomplished the visual equivalent in half the time. Or, gasp, just leave the photo as a photo.
Except, I’m really not sure it would be equivalent. Perception is an odd thing. Side by side perceptions have interested me for a long time. And drawing is fun. For those of you that don’t know me as well, I am finally able to work in color again; it’s been five years since I had to quit painting.
I seriously think there’s a show in a series of these exactly because of those questions it engenders. Process and perception.
“Perception is an odd thing.” And perception filtered through the PC is even weirder. Squared even.
Mark
Catherine:
What’s amazing is that your hiatus from color hasn’t affected your mastery of color one whit. Can you write about what it felt like to work with color again? Sometimes you scare me.
In Figueras, Spain at the Dali Musuem, are a number of pairs of paintings, full sized big canvases, he did on which he attempted to paint EXACTLY the same, complex subject, I mean to the most minute brush stroke and dab of pigment, and then you were supposed to view them through a sort of stereopticon and of course they would give you a 3-D effect. As with much of the work in this museum, I had never seen these pieces before or even knew he did this. It could be argued of course that there was “no point” in him doing this, but that misses the point. Who cares about the point?
Is there anyway to stereo view your pair of works? OK, that sounded so wrong, but you know what I mean.
Mark
Simply wonderful. If I had your gift for drawing, I’d spend all my time doing frame-by-frame-by-frame hand-drawn animations. I think that you could work on it until it is indistinguishable, but also that you could work on this until the distinctions were themselves deeply communicative. Now that you have done versimilitude in such an amazing way, it would be fun to see you do old-fashioned pen-and-ink 8th grade nature book “bird sketch” form of this as well. But that’s not really a suggestion, so much as an appreciation–this is amazing, and it just makes one wonder at all the possibilties.
Re: nature sketches: check out my sketch blog @ http:mydogoscar.com/birdspot
I have been trying that too.
And sincerely, from a contemporary art perspective, I think that there are some real possibilities here…