The Artist's Helper is an application that can help you learn to paint.
A digital helper for physical art.
Painting is simple. Just put the right colours in the right places.
Give it a photo of your subject and it will help you adjust, analyse and simplify it. It will help you break the
image into areas of similar colour for an initial block-in stage.
Give it a photo of the paints on your palette and it will help you mix the colours you need.
Give it a photo of your work-in-progress and it will give suggestions for what to do next.
Once we are comfortable with various tasks, say we'd rather draw our own sketch or choose
our own colours, then we can do those bits on our own. With each new painting we can take on more of the
responsibilities ourselves until we don't need it anymore.
For if you cannot paint what you see you will find your self handicapped in trying to paint what you imagine.
Harold Speed
The Artist's Helper helps artists with the craft of their painting but it
can't help painters with their art.
In the same way violinist plays his scales, so as to acquire the capacity of producing pure tones on his
instrument and training is ear to appreciate accurately the intervals between the different notes, so the
painter trains his eye to perceive accurately the appearances on his retina, and trains his hand to express
accurately these perceptions. Not that playing scales is music, or training the eye is art; but because
without this training we have no control of the means by which artistic things are done. Harold Speed
How do you learn a sport? You do drills. A Language? Conjugate endless verbs. A musical instrument? Scales.
All the misery of repetition, the horror of sitting here in this hall with these zombies suddenly seems worth
it. Dan Harris, 10% Happier (it makes more sense in context).
Gallery
Hello, I am
Bob.
Delighted to make your acquaintance.
I'm not really a painter but I painted these (using little or no natural talent) with the aid of the Artist's Helper and I learned a lot on the way.
If you follow the same processes there is no reason why your paintings shouldn't be as just good or better. I
had a lot of fun making these and I have learnt a lot in the process.
About natural talent meh, skip this bit
When I say using little or no natural talent I am not saying I do not have any natural talent,
only that I did not use any. I simply followed the Artist's Helper
's processes and advice as rigorously as possible.
Just for comparison this is how awesomely talented I was without any help.
Actually there's no such thing as natural talent. Not when it comes to painting. There is only
understanding and practice.
What's more practice is somewhat over rated. When someone really understands a skill they can
be pretty good even if they haven't actually done it before.
Colour mixing
I found colour mixing difficult. So I wrote a program to help me understand colour and work out paint
recipes.
We can select a target colour from the reference image. Then we need to tell the program what paint colours
we have available as mixing ingredients. One way to do this is to load a photograph of samples spread out on a
palette.
The program displays our target colour and our ingredient paints in an interactive colour-space-widget. This
shows us what ingredients to combine to make a trial mixture. Mixing lines are drawn to show what the various
ratios of ingredient paints will give.
We can photograph and load the trial mixes to find how close we are and what to add to get closer still.
A sketch
We need a sketch as a scaffold from which we can hang our paint.
Picking out suitable lines to trace is not easy in some photos. Scaling and printing it to the right size can
be tricky too.
If we enter the size of our canvas our helper will scale it and print it over multiple sheets. Each sheet
will have overlaps at the edges and markers to help line them up accurately.
Colour breakdown
Seeing the colours in a scene is more difficult than it sounds (see
colour judgement
above). Judging the relative values of different colours, that is their lightness or darkness can be even harder.
We can decide which colours we want to use by manually picking them from the subject, having the helper
automatically choose some for us or loading them from a photo of the paints or colours that we have available (useful when we can't so easily modify our available colours such as for mosaics,
embroidery etc.) .
Once we have a trial set of colours it would be nice to see what a picture would look like using only these.
We can add more colours to refine the picture further or disable some to simplify it.
Once the painting is in progress it is hard to see where we may be going wrong. What needs more work and what we
should leave well alone? So I wrote something to compare photos of our work-in-progress to the reference
image.
Several metrics are available and can be displayed in different ways.
Original photo: Oakley
The painting in progress
DeltaE:
the colour shown indicates the colour distance between the subject image and a photo of the canvas.
Baseline:
show areas whose colour difference is over a value specified with a slider control
Hue:
it looks bad but large differences don't matter at low saturations.
Not a very useful measure but it is included for completeness. Somebody might need it
one day.
HueAndSaturation:
hue differences scaled by the saturation
Much more useful. We are looking pretty good here.
Difference:
the same as the difference blending mode in
GIMP. May not be very useful?
Glaze:
the colour of the glaze that would get the canvas closer to the subject.
Colour difference extended and exaggerated by a slider value. Pay particular
attention to colours that aren't simply an exaggerated version of the subject, eg. the blue behind
the nose.
Who is the Artist's Helper aimed at?
It's aimed mostly at me, …but it has value for:
The absolute beginner who wants to paint but doesn't know where to start
Learn how to paint with the assurance of a satisfactory outcome for your endeavours.
With this software there is no need for dozens of time wasting, trial and error attempts which will
probably be immediately discarded before you create your first worthwhile painting.
Those first embarrassing efforts, floundering in the dark, can dent confidence and derail enthusiasm.
Practice versus guidance
We are often told that the only way to learn to paint is to practice, practice, practice. But practice does not
make perfect. Practice makes permanent. If we practice at doing it wrong we will get very good
at doing it wrong. Habituated. We need guidance.
Guidance from the Artist's Helper can save us years of grinding. It cannot
make us into artists but it can help us become good painters.
However, it will only help us learn to create works from reference images.
We will soon be able to paint a decent picture without needing any of that old natural born talent
rubbish.
The more experienced painter who wishes to understand the nature of colour
The colour visualisation tool can help achieve an understanding of the dimensions of colour. It can answer
questions like why can a mix of blue and yellow look green? or why do mixtures of complementary
colours produce greys?.
So, now you know what it is, you should read the
tutorial.
The Artist's Helper 's helpers
I'd like to develop this into a proper product, maybe via a kickstarter campaign. The prototype is
up-and-running but I need some help with testing it and especially help to sanitise and flesh out the tutorial.
I am looking for two or three pioneer guinea pigs who want to learn how to paint and who are amenable to help
me test the software.
This sounds interesting. It's like a way to play without having pressure to necessarily create something complete
from nothing, which, when learning a new medium, is sometimes the hardest part. u/CinderQuill22 via r/learnart (about
tracing but applicable to the whole thing)
Application changes
If anyone has anything they'd like added just let me know.
Here are some changes I'm contemplating that I'd like some opinions on
Layer name changes. Some are confusing. It's difficult to write about paints in the tutorial when it might
mean a layer, some physical paints, some palette entries. Also some layers have the same initial so the hotkeys
are odd.
paints -> preview or rendering
subject -> filtered
original -> unfiltered or reference (or possibly subject -> reference)