Chuck Close Documentary

[Synthetik]

There's an interesting documentary of painter Chuck Close playing on the Ovation art cable tv channel this month. Those of you who have played with the MSG Evolver ArtMapper will probably understand why i find his work interesting. Watching the documentary made me realize i should probably pay more attention to diagonal diamond grids for art mapping. MSG Evolver provides some diagonal diamond grid options, but they are adaptive, and having a simple repetitive diamond grid would be a useful addition to the Art Mapper section. The visual system's spatial frequency perception falls off at diagonal spatial frequencies (you can't see them as well as a normal rectangular grid of the same dimensions), so it's perhaps not surprising why Close uses the diagonal grid so much. There's a really nice example in the documentary of a painting that uses a circular tiling which is quite nice, another grid option i should add at some point in the future. I like the adaptive grids a lot for image database photo mosaic art mapping. But there is a visual simplicity to a simple regular grid that is really appealing in some situations. One way to think about it is that a regular grid is not lighting up as many neurons when you see it, as opposed to an adaptive grid that is going to be firing off many more spatially tuned channels in the visual system.

[Synthetik]

I took a quick stab at a Chuck Close style simulation in MSG Evolver using the Art-Mapper. You can see the results here.

A totally different approach would be to just create a black and white grid in Studio Artist and then use the Flat Region Colorize Ip Op with one of the dual mean coloring variations to split the blocks black and white, then reduce the contrast and then recolorize that image. I'll try to post an example of that when i get the chance.

Or, i guess you could build your diagonal black and white block image, make that the current selection, then use the paint synthesizer regionize features. You'd want the path start to be 'selection as regions- all levels'. You could use the paint color modulate parameters to build in an opponent coloring modulation into the paint to help diferentiate the patterning in the individual blocks and use an outline fill region pattern type for the path start regionize path type in path shape control panel.

[Synthetik]

I put together an example of what i mean about using Flat Color Regionize to colorize a black and white diagonal grid. This example was generated using only Studio Artist Ip Ops.

I also thought it should be easier to work with diagonal regions in the paint synthesizer than the technique i described above, so i added some new features i'm using in this example.

[Synthetik]

Here's a quick experiment using the vectorizer to generate some inset patterns within the grid. I'm just adjusting the color luminance for the inserts, but there are an infinite variety of different approaches you could take (opponent colors, analogous colors, etc). the idea is to set the areas of the different inserts so the sum to generate the original color value for the grid square. that way you can generate a lot of local texture that averages out to the original image as the viewer steps back (or blurs their eyes).