Every great novel starts with a few words scribbled onto a page (more likely typed into a text editor these days). Every large and comprehensive software program starts from very humble roots. And the best approach is always to get something going, then build and improve it over time as people start using it.
And so begins the Artistic Styles Taxonomy, with this blog post. Which we will hopefully all expand off of to build this thing into something interesting.
So what is 'this thing'?
I want us to put together an 'Artistic Styles Taxonomy'. It would be an online resource available to all. That tries to catalog different visual styles associated with different artistic rendering techniques.
Artistic Rendering could be the stereotypical traditional art tools. The paint brush. Painting with acrylic paint, or oil paint, or water color paint. Or pens, pencils, chalk. Fingernails scratching away a surface. Wet finger smear. Really watery drips. Paper towel wipe.
Artistic Rendering is also associated with different printing technologies. Those traditional printing technologies can be thought of as a kind of art rendering technology that pre-dates more technological approaches to image rendering like photography, or the various commercial 'printing' technologies that have been invented over the years.
Silk screen printing, wood cut block printing, acid etching or scratching a metal plate and then printing off of that, halftone screen effects associated with 3 or 4 color printing technologies, etc, etc. They all look very different. They all look very unique. They all have an associated artistic visual style.
Photography can be thought of as a pretty mature technology at this point. So mature we don't even use the older analog techniques anymore at all, unless we are beaded hipsters who live in Brooklyn, and even then, we are probably just dabbling into working with low-fi analog film cameras rather then deep diving into the very deep history of the various chemical techniques proposed over the years for photographic development and printing.
And all of those different historical variations have their own unique visual artistic style. Directly created by the physical limitations of whatever underlying technological and chemical processes make it up.
What would be the components of an individual entry into this Artistic Styles Taxonomy?
1: We want really nice images that show off the style.
We want detailed images that show off the micro-structure associated with the art style. really good example that can help educate us about what makes this art style and associated rendering technology look the way it does.
We also want really nice examples of completed pieces of artwork that were generated using the associated technique.
Ultimately we're going to have to get pretty specific about how we name and folder organize these example images. Because we want to be able to use these collections of images associated with the artistic styles taxonomy as data input into various adaptive learning systems.
But while we're getting started we can be less rigid about the specifics of those details.
2: We want a nice text explanation of the specifics of the art style technique. What are it's historical roots? How does it work, down to the nitty gritty details for any boffins reading the taxonomy.
3: Studio Artist presets that emulate the style. More on that below.
How is this Artistic Styles Taxonomy going to be used?
I see three potential usage cases for the Taxonomy. You may very well think of additional ones.
1: Education. This project is designed to be an educational resource. For everyone. But especially for artists. Very especially for digital artists.
You may want to learn more about a very specific artistic technique.
Or you may be looking for inspiration, and want to browse through different artistic styles to jump-charge your imagination.
We also tend to forget things. Having a specific place to go when you are trying to remember that art style you liked, but can't remember the name of, or the details of how it works.
2: A repository for Studio Artist presets that emulate the specific artistic technique and associated visual style.
It would be great to be able to go to the Artistic Styles Taxonomy, look up a particular style of interest, and then be able to download some Studio Artist presets that emulate that artistic visual style.
So we hope to see that develop over time. Synthetik can post new presets to specific taxonomy entries. An so can individual Studio Artist users who enjoy building and sharing custom presets (we love all of you by the way for doing that).
3: A database that can also be used as input to various deep learning neural net systems we will be springing on you over the next few years.
We have been very hard at work putting together all kinds of different deep learning neural net technologies we are going to be infusing the Studio Artist universe over the coming years. Building up good databases of curated images that are good representations of different artistic styles, or different emotional moods one might want their artwork to convey, are going to be very useful to use to custom train these deep learning neural net technologies.
This stuff is going to totally reimagine the photo manipulation and digital art worlds. You are starting to see it everywhere, and that trend is going to accelerate. Companies like Adobe will infuse Photoshop with their corporate take on how to use this stuff. Synthetik Software has some very different conceptions on how to use it. Which will become apparent over time, but really mirror how we look at digital art.
Digital artists win big. It's going to be a lot of fun to see how this all develops.
We haven't even begun to imagine what the ultimate uses of this new adaptive learning technology are going to be. But i do know it is going to be extremely exciting.
So please, consider contributing to this project in some way. If we all work together, i think we can build a very useful Artistic Styles Taxonomy. And learn a lot in the process.
Replies
I thought it would be useful to put together a complete AST (artistic styles taxonomy) entry to use as a straw man. So that people can wrap their brains better around what this AST project is all about anyway.
This is a work in progress. So i'll pull it together in several posts in this thread. And we can figure out together if it meets our needs (or if not how to modify it to do so).
Note that i'm using the 'AST' acronym to speed up typing 'Artistic Styles Taxonomy'. And more obscure Studio Artist terminology is created for your enjoyment (ha,ha).
I'm going to focus on woodcut prints.
Because they are cool. They can look great, and have very strong artistic styles associated with them.
So the specific AST name entry would be titled 'woodcut print'.
There could be additional text tag entries associated with the entry. Hopefully we will all move towards some tagging hierarchy that makes sense for our uses. A secondary taxonomy of descriptive terms we can use to help organize our individual AST entries. For ease of access, searches, latent-space manipulation, etc.
What about hierarchy? Artistic styles certainly live in hierarchies.
Woodcut prints live in a more general hierarchical category of 'PrintMaking Techniques'.
Entries in a 'Printmaking Techniques' category could include 'woodcut print', 'engraving print', 'etching print', 'lithograph print', 'screen print'.
A short textural description of an entry or a category would be very useful, so that should be included in our AST structure as well. So my initial proposed 'description' for the 'PrintMaking Techniques' category is the following:
"Printmaking is an artistic process based on the transfer of an image from a temporary storage plate onto a desired final surface, like paper, or fabric, or metal, or maybe silicon wafer if you are printing circuitry.
A Storage Plate could be made out of wood, metal, glass, 'other fun stuff we haven't thought of yet', etc.
A 'design' (some call it the 'template') needs to be created on the surface of the storage plate. The design could be made on the surface of the plate using tools that work the surface in some fashion (scrape, cut, burnish, chemically deteriorate, physically burn, etc). The tool could be worked manually, or a machine could do it.
After the design is created on the storage plate, then that plate can be used to print one or more finished prints.
Note that all of the hard work associate with generating the design on the plate is just associated with constructing the template (which is not the finished art, just a part of a tool you then use to make the actual art). You can then use that template to make your final art by printing it from the worked plate.
Printing from a finished plate requires the plate to first be inked. Some procedure is then used to transfer the ink from the plate to the surface of the substrate you are printing to
The ink transfer procedure may require the application of controlled pressure.
Being artistic about how you apply the ink to the plate and then to the final substrate can also be an element of an individual artist's personal style (partial inking, uses textured brushes to apply and smear the ink, using different color inks in different parts of the plate, etc."
My initial proposed 'description' for the 'woodcut print' entry is the following:
"A design is first created on the surface of a piece of wood (the plate). The design is created by removing specific top parts of the surface of the wood (digging it out).
There are specialized manual woodcutting tools that artists can use to aid in cutting different kinds of grooves, flat areas, generate different kinds of textures, etc on the surface of the wood.
Robotically enthused individuals could use computer controlled woodcutting systems to do all the 'dig and cut the design on the surface' work (as an alternative to manually working the surface of the wood to build up the plate).
Once the surface of the wooden plate has been manipulated to create the finished design, then that plate can be used to print copies of the final artwork. The wooden plate is inked and then a substrate (typically paper) printed (usually using some kind of printing press that applies controlled pressure to aid in the transfer of the ink from the plate to the substrate"
I'll move on to detail some examples of the kind of images we would want to include in this AST entry in my next post in this thread.
And we can also talk about how to hook Studio Artist presets into an AST entry as well (that will also be an additional post in this thread).
I hope you can already see how the textural descriptions can be really useful for anyone trying to visualize how to go about constructing a StudioArtist preset to emulate the art style. because you want to emulate the process.
Working with the image examples will provide even more information to aid in preset construction.
You would also want to have links to more detailed descriptions available for a particular technique.
So for the 'woodcut print' entry this link does a great job of describing the technique in detail with text and video examples.