Hello everyone. First of all sorry for the long post, but I couldn't make it shorter. Let's start. I'm writing this post because at least two people have made a mistake. The first one is me. I made a few repaints of the free stock photos from pexels
Second one is the person who published posts about me under @jaguar.force. @jaguar.force claims that my work isn't digital painting, but AI tool used to generate images that look like art. He has found the source of the repaints or the photos that are taken from the source.
The posts I'm refering to are the following:
- Art Fraud Case #82 - Caso de Fraude Artístico #82 - @modern-trojan
- Art Fraud Case #83 - Caso de Fraude Artístico #83 - @modern-trojan
- Art Fraud Case #84 - Caso de Fraude Artístico #84 - @modern-trojan
I have commented on those posts in order to solve this problem. I have received feedback from @midlet - admin of the OnChainArt community. He brought valid arguments that back the claim that my works are done by AI. The comment can be viewed here. I also tried contacting @jaguar.force on discord, but no search results were displayed so I'm writing this on chain.
This post is my explanation why it isn't done by AI, and an explanation how I made such digital paintings. So let's start with an original photo:
According to the @jaguar.force the source of the original photo is: serenevistas however I have downloaded it from pexels under the license that allows commercial and non-commercial use and editing without the attribution to the photographer. But this is a minor thing and it's the same photo so there won't be many words about it later. Let me begin the explanation of how I made a digital painting.
What every artist does at the beginning is to lay down basic shapes of the subject that he is drawing. This is what I did too. Keep in mind that these aren't volumetric shapes, instead they are shapes operating in 2 point perspective. The goal was to get the position and proportion of houses correctly.
The next thing I've done are some additional windows that I decided are of importance for the whole composition. I forgot to say that I am completely self taught. This fact will explain some techniques others might consider odd or obsolete. I'm learning digital and traditional since 2018. But I made a few paintings on paper before.
Next part I did is that I traced the tree outline of the tree and its branches. I did this to save time. I could do it by angle transferring, but it would take me much time and makes little sense doing it digitally.
After making the skeleton of a tree, I added an rough outline of treetop and I also added an edge of the tree to the left.
When it all combines together it looks like this. Note that the image is flipped horizontally. This is because I flip it a number of times while working so that I can spot mistakes more easily.
After having the skeleton done I used my free hand to draw rough outline of the houses. I did this because I'm not a fan of tracing and I try to develop my skill that I completely stop relying on it. I am pretty confident when doing it traditionally, but when doing digital it's much harder to draw a straight line.
I did the same for the tree base. I turned on stroke recording while I did this for the next step. Also I forgot to say that I'm drawing the used out tablet with malfunctioning pressure sensitivity so I turned it off.
Stroke recording helped me do this. Although it took me a lot of time i did color those recorded strokes instead of leaving them black. Every few strokes I applied a certain color and so on.
These two images are what I referenced to get the color. The left one shows distribution of values across the photo. Right one helped me reference color saturation and hue. I got these two images by using photoshop option: filter -> filter gallery -> cutout. This is a double edged sword however. Although it shows values with high precision, it can make huge mistakes when doing the same in color (like the upper right corner). I found out of this on youtube in an art fundamentals tutorial.
Finally the time has come for the coloring and shading. I used a bit smaller brush then for the outline, I reduced flow also. I want to mention that at this point I started using custom brushe with multiple "bristles". This photo shows painting a part of a house.
On this image you see the painting of the left house nearly done. One note here - while working on the painting I have merged some layers so I had to re-create steps, this resulted in a slightly different strokes.
Going on that way I did the full painting of houses, tree and some grass near them.
On the left you see the last steps. I increased the size of the brush while reducing flow to cover larger area making it a little more blurry and abstract, but not too much.
And the last step after painting everything was to fix some mistakes I made.
I hope I have delivered necessary and sufficient proof that this is not the product of AI, deep learning, neural network or however you can name it.
Also in the post where I'm mentioned as a fraud I saw the term "plagiarized". Just to make everything clear plagiarism is: "the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own."
This is a definition that popped out on google when I searched. Here we aren't talking about that as it can be clearly seen above. This is a derivative work. And yes it is considered copyright infringement if done without permission. This is why I used free images from pexels. The reason why I'm doing repaints of photos is not that I want to steal anything. The fact is that I'm not that skilled to be able to draw from imagination. This is why I'm using a combination of observation and measuring.
And yes it was my mistake not to put sources of the original, I'm very sorry for that. I never meant to hide anything, this is why I didn't stop myself from repainting a free picture that has been viewed around 2.5 million times. That would be silly to even try plagiarizing.
I just wanted to mention @midlet and @jaguar.force for doing amazing work as exposing frauds and plagiarizers is essential part of keeping the community alive. Also I would kindly ask them to resteem this (if it was of enough proof) so the people who saw previous posts in order to minimize the damage done not only to me, but to the curie, a respectable curator organization which has been upvoting some of my posts, and whose some creators are my personal friends who did so much good to this community both on steem and hive. All the rewards from this post will be donated to the hive fund.
I will also mention some of the voters of the posts I put the links in the beginning and ask them to reconsider their votes. Please excuse my brevity as my goal is not to spam users, but inform them about my side of the story.
@upmewhale @likwid @meesterboom @holoz0r @cryptoandcoffee @steemaction @gerber @templo @buildawhale @themarkymark @joshman @bluesniper
Now if you have read all of this I wish to thank you. I also wish you all the best.
Look man, I don't have an all seeing eye, and I can't say with 100% certainty how you created these images. What I do have is over a decade of not only painting, but teaching painting and not only is this not convincing, it's further proof to me at least that these images are created with AI software. Since I'm making this claim I suppose I should elaborate on why I'm concluding this, not only for you but for anyone else you @'ed here and they can make up their own mind.
The very first images are clearly traced with a line tool and they are very simple shapes. If you have the skill to take the painting to a finish, especially some of the other paintings on your blog, you can just draw a simple house and tree without needing to trace it.
Then you go over those traced lines. This part I can imagine being done by hand maybe. The next color step is a pretty big give away. It makes no sense to start filling in these lines with color that stays consistent throughout the rest of the painting. This is a give away that that color is already there and you're just filling in the silhouette shapes.
It also makes no sense to completely finish these random areas of the painting totally out of context to what's around them and to have none of that information change all the way to the end of the painting. This is not how humans paint. Things get moved around, people make mistakes, adjustments, etc. Humans are not scanners that scan an image from subject to background. That looks to me like someone "imagining" how people paint things coming up with, but this is not what any human painting process looks like and I've taught beginners for years.
Also worth noting, I don't care if someone paints from a photo. I don't require that people show their reference in OCA. It is assumed that people used some reference and it's not particularly important to me whether something was painted from imagination or photo reference. This is another one of those weird Steem rules created by people who are not artists not really understanding the process. I DO prohibit direct copies of other artists drawings or paintings because at that point it's not derivative, it's just a copy. The act of interpreting and translating a photo into a drawing or painting is making something derivative in and of itself.
That's not my issue here. My assertion is that these are not painted. There are tons of AI software out there and some are quite sophisticated. I've played with them before so I know what they're capable of. Nothing you've shown here has convinced me that this is not what you did.
Again, I should reiterate that I have NO HARD EVIDENCE that this is what you did, so if others want to discard what I'm saying here, I can understand that. So there may be other Communities that welcome your work, that's up to them. It's a free blockchain.
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Look, I gotta give you something, you put a lot of time and imagination into this bullshit.
That being said, I stand by my assessment, all of those three pieces and a lot more in your profile were made by an algorithmic processing tool, you did not paint that.
In the case of the diver piece, just looking at the close up is irrefutable evidence that that was not made by a human, no human does strokes like that, and any professional artist can tell you that, I consulted with two of them before making my decision.
Good try though. Have a nice day.
And for you @hiddenblade since I see you upvoted this preposterous bullshit,
just watch this:
And now please tell me you are so idiotic, naive and ignorant so as to truly believe a human painted this.....