The feature list of Hacker News is similar to Reddit, but the content and the nature of quality control are entirely different, and his issues were about the content he saw on those websites. In light of that I don't agree that his comment is hypocritical.
The inspiration for Newspeak is Basic English, which is much like Esperanto but with English words (at least it's described as such — I'm not actually very familiar with Basic English myself). Constructed languages had some avid supporters back in the early 20th century, looking to make some constructed language the international language. Though I don't know much about Basic English, the unique looks of Newspeak definitely come, directly or indirectly, from Esperanto's ideas for keeping the vocabulary small and simple. To illustrate, in Esperanto the word for "good" is "bona", "bad" is "malbona" ("ungood"), and "to improve" is "plibonigi" ("to moregoodify").
I was wondering more about why he put newspeak in 1984 as a way for party to controll people minds and eliminate "though crimes". I do not know history of Basic English and Esperanto but it seems very improbable that their creators were aiming at the same goals as Ministry of Truth.
I don't recommend adding black to get shadow colors — you're not going to get pretty colors if you take that approach. Shadows have a bit of a color of their own. What you need to do is think of the bounce light in the scene, and I'll use an example to explain.
First of all, if you've got a sphere in deep space, its shadow side is going to be pure black, since there's pretty much no light bouncing around, and so there's no light to be reflected by the shadow side of the sphere. Now let's take an indoors scene: Imagine a room with red walls, a white floor, a single neutral (white light) ceiling lamp and a white sphere in the middle, what color is the sphere's shadow going to be? In the red-walled room, the shadows of the sphere would be subtly red — especially in the parts of the shadow where it's facing the walls more than the floor. That's because the light you see in the shadows of an object is light that has already been reflected from other surfaces in the room. This reflected light, in the case of the red walls, is red.
Of course in a more complicated scene you just approximate it. For an outside scene, you usually want to make your shadows only a bit darker and move your shadow color's hue a little closer to the color of the sky. But colors are difficult, you learn through experience really.
> Since most artists probably start with a composition in the 2d space of the artwork, there’s never really a coherent 3d space to place the light sources in or figure out those projections in.
Highly skilled artists don't just think in 2D — they really do imagine the 3D scene that they're painting. It's hard to relate to but people with a lot of drawing/painting experience can "feel the form", as they say, when they draw. But it's true that figuring out the lighting is still difficult even then.
I do want to point out that if you look at talented painters from later in history than the early renaissance, they don't make nearly as many mistakes as the ones in the article, although of course the lighting of imaginary scenes is still always approximated and simplified.
It's a skillset that gives you a very different way of perceiving the world. I find it difficult to describe but "feeling the form" feels close to my experience while drawing. When I haven't drawn in a while and I pick up a pencil my first few sketches are always stiff, awkward, and cartoonish. It's like I'm drawing an emoji or a logo or something. Then after a little while I remember how to feel the form again and I start to be able to articulate the shape and the weight of an object and translate that convincingly to the page. It really isn't thinking in 2D, per se, it's thinking in...flattened 3D maybe?
To your point about painters from later in history, I think once linear perspective was codified and became more widespread it made the process of projecting shadows much easier for artists. In a lot of renaissance artwork you can actually map out the perspective lines to find that the artist was working with multiple incompatible vanishing points, hence the wonky spatiality of many of the paintings from that era.
The paintings in the article are mostly 15th century, which is only early renaissance. The understanding of light in painting was still somewhat limited in those times. I think in the case of almost all of these paintings it's more a matter of technical competence rather than artistic intention (exceptions include "Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints" where I reckon the shadow ends early for compositional reasons). It's interesting to look at this to get a sense of the various ways people can get something wrong before someone gets it right.
> The understanding of light in painting was still somewhat limited in those times.
I'm confident even cavemen saw and comprehended shadows against a wall.
Btw, do any of the "humans" in these paintings pass the "not the real thing!" test? It is a painting and in every instance it is clear the correct shadow would mess up the composition.
Next stop an article on "How poets have gotten grammar wrong all these years".
It can't be that hard to sketch what you see on a sunny day or in candlelight and start to make sense of the rules, right? Getting perspective to look right in paintings seems like it should be a more challenging invention than how shadows behave around corners, walls, and other objects. Getting the sizes and shapes of the shadows correct would be another matter, however.
So I am willing to assume that if a shadow fails to climb up a wall, it's because the artist thought it looked better without the shadow on the wall.
In "Polittico di Sant’Antonio" the cut-off shadow is at the edge of the painting, so I imagine that one might have just been an oversight from the painter. But in general, it is pretty difficult to get shadows right when you're not painting from life since you don't just need to understand how the basic rules work, you also need to be able to imagine how it works and apply it.
But more generally, being among the first to figure things out isn't easy. Nowadays you can look at photographs and paintings like the works of 19th century academic painters and say "this is how realistic paintings are supposed to look", but back in the 15th century all you would be able to see is other people doing it not quite right. I feel like it takes a bit of genius to be the first to do something right, and frankly the average artist isn't that smart.
I'm of course no art historian of any sort, don't even play one online. However, yes, perspective, proportionality and light were being paid more attention to in art at that juncture in art. Often, in current and historical naive and current and historical primitive art, we see the same issues with bad perspectives and bad shadow treatment. That said, in many cases the artists knew but did not care and had a different focus. Still I agree that in many cases the artists didn't want this "interference". Just as today your roadside artists may not include all the municipal electric wires or all the trash or cloud shadows and so on in one of their paintings when capturing an atmosphere or panorama.
Linear perspective was "invented" in 1415 and codified in a 1450 book, at which point the concept started to spread but still wasn't widely understood. A lot of the paintings in this article have extremely wonky perspective as well. This was a transitional era in art history when formal rules for realistic painting were being developed but weren't necessarily widely or correctly used.
> when doing paintovers on copyrighted images (VERY common)
What are you talking about? I've been doing drawing and digital painting as a hobby for a long time and tracing is absolutely not "VERY common". I don't know anybody who has ever done this.
> fan art where they paint trademarked characters (also VERY common)
This is true in the sense that many artists do it (besides confusing trademark law and copyright law: the character designs are copyright-protected, trademarks protect brand names and logos). However, it is not fair use (as far as I'm aware at least, I'm not a lawyer). A rightholder can request for fanart to be removed and the artist would have to remove it. Rightsholders almost never do, because fanart doesn't hurt them.
There's also more examples of it reproducing copyright-protected images, I pulled the "bloodborne box art" prompt from this article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.03860.pdf
But I agree with you that reproducing images is very much not the intention of Stable Diffusion, and it's already very rare. The way I see it, the cases of Stable Diffusion reproducing images too closely is just a gotcha for establishing a court case.
Paintover does not have to mean actual 'tracing', a LOT of artists use photos as direct references and paint over them in a separate layer, keeping the composition, poses, colors very close to the original while still changing details and style enought to make it transformative enough to be considered a 'new work'.
Here are two examples of artist Sam Yang using two still frames from the tv show Squid Game and painting over those, the results which he then sells as prints:
That said, you could even get away with less transformation and still have it be considered original work, take Andy Warhol's 'Orange Marilyn' and 'Portrait of Mao', those are inked and flat color changes over photographs.
First of all, those are only two works in a very large body of works of an artist that seems to work almost entirely from imagination, which already counters the claim that this is a very common way of working, since even this artist would almost never work like that. Secondly, putting strangely much effort into a comment on Hacker News, I actually looked up the source frame of one of these: https://youtu.be/K6hOvyz65jM?t=236
It's definitely based on the frame but it's not a paint-over as you claim. I know this because there are too many mistakes with regards to proportion:
- Extending the slant roof in the background, it intersects with the left figure at around the height of the nose, but in the painting it intersects with the middle of her neck.
- Similarly the line of the fence on the left is at the height of her hairline, but in the painting it is at the height of the middle of the head, and also more slanted than in the frame.
- On the right side, the white part of the pillar is similarly too low compared to the figure.
- The pole in the background has a lot of things off with regards to size, thickness, or location too.
Essentially, everything is a bit off with regards to location, size and distance. It doesn't really make sense to paint over something and then still do everything differently from the base layer, so it was probably just drawn from reference the normal way -- probably having the picture on another screen and drawing it again from scratch, rather than directly painting over the frame.
I agree with regards to Warhol but that doesn't really establish it as very common amongst painters.
>that seems to work almost entirely from imagination
I very much doubt that.
>Secondly, putting strangely much effort into a comment on Hacker News
Note sure what you are implying here, could you elaborate ? The reason I know about these images is because they've been posted, alongside many other similar examples, in discussions regarding AI art.
>I know this because there are too many mistakes with regards to proportion:
Have you ever used programs like Photoshop, Krita et al ? You can start painting directly over a photo, and then easily transform the proportions of all components in the image, and since you draw them in layers, they can be done without affecting eachother.
I have no doubt that he started painting these over the reference photos, and then used the 'warp tool' in his painting program of choice to alter the proportions, a very common technique.
And this is PERFECTLY FINE, the resulting artwork is transformative enough to be considered a new work of art, which is true for practically every piece of art I've seen generated by Stable Diffusion, the only one I've seen that I'm doubtful about is the 'bloodborne box art' one, which is THE example that is always brought up as it such an outlier.
You can see his actual workflow on his YouTube channel. He shows his painting process there but doesn't show his sketching process, but I hope that you believe that people are able to draw from imagination at least.
> Note sure what you are implying here, could you elaborate?
I just meant I was probably putting to much effort into an online discussion.
> I have no doubt that he started painting these over the reference photos, and then used the 'warp tool' in his painting program of choice to alter the proportions, a very common technique.
It's simply not a common technique at all. I'm not sure why you're making these statements because it feels like your knowledge of how illustrators work is extremely limited. I've heard of people photobashing -- which is when artists combine photo manipulation and digital painting to more easily produce realistic artworks. It's got mixed opinions about it and many consider it cheating but within the field of concept art it's common because it's quick and easy. However, there's huge amounts of people who can just draw and paint from sight or imagination. There's the hyperrealists who often act as a human photocopier, but artists who do stylized art of any kind are just people who can draw from imagination. I'm not sure why that's something you "very much doubt" to be quite honest. Just looking on YouTube for things like art timelapses, you can find huge amounts of people who draw entirely from imagination. Take Kim Jung Gi as a somewhat well known example. That guy was famous amongst illustrators for drawing complicated scenes directly in pen without any sketches. But there's really plenty of people that can do these things.
You seem to be under the impression that the average artist uses every shortcut available to get a good result, but that is simply not true. Most artists I know refuse to do anything like photobashing because they consider it cheating and because it isn't how they want to work, nevermind directly drawing on top of things. Drawing from sight isn't uncommon as a way to study art, so in case you're wondering why Sam Yang would be able to reproduce the frame so closely, it's because that's how artists study painting.
> Have you ever used programs like Photoshop, Krita et al
Yes, very often. The thing is: Just because it's possible does not mean it actually happens.
The LAION-5B dataset is public, so you can check directly whether a picture is in there or not. StabilityAI only takes a very limited amount of information from each individual picture, so for Stable Diffusion to closely reproduce a picture it would need to appear quite frequently in the dataset. There are examples of this, such as old famous paintings, "bloodborne box art" and probably many others, though I haven't looked deeply into it.
