MAY 4TH - PAUL ARNOTT - PAINTING WITH A COMPUTER
Announcements were made regarding the forthcoming FLAIR exhibition in the Kingfisher Centre and the arrangements for our Tate Britain trip. Judith Sullivan, our acting Chair, explained that our planned speaker could not attend but that Paul Arnott had kindly agreed, at short notice, to give his presentation on “Computer Art". Working on his laptop with the output projected onto a screen, Paul described his working set-up and demonstrated the features of the Corel Painter software package. The system can be driven by a conventional mouse or by the built-in navigation controls of the laptop but these are not practicable for the type of subject under consideration. Instead, Paul uses a graphics pad and stylus to input to the system and would go on to demonstrate how precise and sensitive this combination can be. Although he uses Corel Painter Version 10, Paul explained that a budget version, Corel Painter Essentials, is available and that this has most of the features of Version 10.
The system is designed to respond to the painters input and produce an image on the screen that replicates that of the chosen medium. All the variables that confront the artist when working conventionally are selectable. From drop-down menus, the desired surface can be chosen with a range of all possible surface finishes. With the medium, brush type and size, painting surface and finish, all settled; the remaining basic variable is the palette of colours. The system provides colour palettes but also has a refinement whereby reference photographs or paintings can be scanned and used to generate their corresponding palette of colours. A palette knife tool can be used to blend colours and the opacity of colour can also be selected. Up to this point, the production of a painting would seem rather mechanical but the system has more clever refinements, which can interpret the pressure and angle of the stylus and vary the mark accordingly and the mark can be applied conventionally or with a blending or dry-brushing effect.
Paul went on to compose a painting on his laptop using many of the system’s features. The painting included mountains, trees and buildings and exploited the graded-wash and selection tools. The trees, buildings, walls and other features were picked out from a library of images and scaled and positioned appropriately. Paul amused his audience by importing a number of incongruous images likes aircraft and other vehicles, simply to illustrate how easy it was to introduce these and, equally easily, get rid of them again. The software can also generate geometric shapes and these, combined with some freehand drawing, were used to compose a still-life subject. Finally, using the Dynamic Auto Painter package, Paul gave an intriguing demonstration of how a subject can be transformed into a painting in the style of any reference painting and used paintings by some of the old masters to show the step-by-step transformation of his painting.
Paul answered a range of questions during his presentation and, at the finish, was asked about the production of prints from the computer-generated artwork. He touched on the problems of matching the computer screen image to the output of a printer and the selection of suitable printing papers. He talked briefly about how printers offered a range of profiles to provide the best screen-to-printer match but the subject of image reproduction seems to be a topic in its own right and might, in future, be considered for a presentation.
David Price
