A Formula for Picture Success

[Clavo]

In his research on why some of his pictures sold and others didn't, William Mortensen found a formula for what makes an effective picture. He gives the formula in his book, 'The Command To Look', which is available as a pdf at the bottom of this page -

www.whmortensen.com/

[Synthetik]

Thanks for the introduction to this artist and his pdf book of thoughts on the elements of the making of successful art imagery.

I wasn't familiar with him or his book, and it's an interesting read. I wasn't sure where it was headed at first, and then it did start to get into some interesting and through provoking subject areas. I pounded through it really quickly to get a quick overview, and will spend some more time ting to really understand his key points.

The notion of activating precognitive awareness is an interesting one. I'm using that terminology to describe his step 1, make the person look at it. And he gives a sort of loose historical analysis of why pre-cognitive neural activation of the visual system would be important. But you could revisit that kind of analysis through modern neural perceptual research or psycho-physical visual experiments and see how that correlates with his more instinctive analysis.

The notion of perceiving the primary mass in the image as being one of his 4 elements of pre-cognitive activation is an interesting one. Analysis of shape and form via abstracting the 'mass' of the image or object being represented has a long and active tradition when you run through the history of the elements of artistic representation. And it also shows up in scientific studies and analysis of the visual system.

That's one of the reasons we added the Mass Abstractor ip op to Studio Artist. To provide a tool to directly generate 'mass' as a basic component of digital art imagery. And obviously there are other ip op effects, like Threshold for example, which can be used to generate this kind of thing. A raw representation of Mass from a source image. 

We also have another effect called Sketch Mass. Which again, is trying to derive a primary mass representation of a source image input to it, bit then build the representation of the primary mass using all kinds of different sketch elements to build it up, as opposed to it just being a big solid representation. Again, trying to mirror some established techniques associated with how artists have tried to use shading or different patterning techniques to build up mass in artistic imagery.

As a side note, you can use the Sketch Mass ip op to generate bezier paths that you could then auto-paint in using any paint synthesizer preset, so the combination of the 2 is extremely powerful, much more so than just the limited set of visual representations and stylistic looks you get out of the base Sketch mass ip op effect itself. I mentioned this particular approach because again i think most Studio Artist users miss synergistic things like this and don't really end up adding them to their bag of tools because they move beyond the usage of single paint or ip op presets.

Now whether these 'generate mass' effects generate something like his definition of primary mass or not is interesting. Because he describes it as providing a dominant mass focus to the image. And depending on the particular source image you start with, and the particular digital effect you apply to that, you may or not generate a mass representation with the elemental properties he thinks is important.

So as a designer of digital effects, that's kind of interesting to think about. You can use judicious application of various preprocessing techniques to the source image to force that kind of ultimate property from the output of a mass generating digital effect. But maybe we could do a better job of providing automatic ways to do that.

I guess another fun experiment might be a MSG processor that tries to generate a randomized image that falls into one of his 4 pre-cognitive activation categories. And maybe you could already do that by taking what is in there and building the appropriate MGS presets to do it.

We could get into analyzing all of this in much more detail, but i did want to bring up one topic that kind of jumped out at me when i quickly read through his little book, and how it relates to some existing Studio Artist effects, and some of the thought that went into why we added them to the program in the first place.

So i think one interesting question to open up for discussion, in addition to whether people agree with Mortensen's analysis or not, is what additional tools could be added to Studio Artist to aid digital artists in creating 'successful' imagery.

And there are lots of different places this kind of thing could be added to the program.

And when you are talking about using Studio Artist to automatically generate imagery via things like Gallery Show generative processes, adding some more 'intelligence' to the processes taking place would be a really interesting thing to do.