I like to use technology to help me learn. This forum and what Anthony does for all of us is a great example. I am currently working on copying a painting by an artist named Jason Walker (with his permission). I don’t sell my work and it’s just practice but still like to ask permission as I post my progress on Instagram. Was having trouble with the value transitions in parts As it is all orange. I found an app called LightX which is for photo editing. Their is a poster setting and if you manipulate the setting it helps break the picture into vectors (not sure if that is the right word). Of course photoshop can do this but if you don’t know how which I don’t and only want to spend 1.99 which I did this is a good thing to play with. Below is Jason’s original, my attempt at a first layer, and the manipulated photo reference. I found it helpful.
By the way. The playbill happens to be on table for a show called “in and of itself” in nyc. It will blow your mind. Sorry to go off topic. Gooogle it. Any artist would appreciate it even though it has nothing to do with art.
Order got messed up. It goes manipulated then Jason’s then mine.
You have to be careful with these posterise filters. They don’t deliver results that are visually accurate, which can be seen in the reference you generated. There are bands of a more brownish colour that don’t belong there. Posterisation usually works separately on the colour channels which might be mathematically correct, but not perceptually. You will get different results depending on the colour space/model this calculation is performed in. A more accurate way is to convert the image into a bitmap, such as gif or png, with a custom made limited colour map. This process is not fool proof either and will require some manual tweaking of individual colours, but it’s the only way I know to correctly visualise steps of tone and value within a gradation. I’ve attached an image to illustrate the difference to your LightX generated posterisation.
This is fantastic Mark. It is wonderful to see artists exploring current technologies to better understand perception and visual communication and how best to deploy the understanding relative to our personal goals.
I believe that your exploration of the original was quite successful. Such subject matter can present significant challenge for an observational representationalist effort as there is quite the ocean of subtlety to be found between value, hue and chroma. All in all though—I think you did a fine job.
Thank you for the info on the app! I’ll be sure to check it out.
Thx peter. Very helpful. Appreciate it. I need all the help I can get