The Artist's Helper

Page info

X

A prototype of the Artist's Helper homepage, mid 2020, with added info for alpha testers

(And no adverts as promised on Reddit).

Click a heading or border to toggle a section, or in the margins to collapse them all.

(Except contents sections).

If a section is already collapsed when first encountered then it's probably even more boring than usual.

Skip it.

Learn to paint with the Artist's Helper

The Artist's Helper is an application that can help you learn to paint.

… paint with real paint, oils or acrylics or whatnot, not digital painting. It's a digital helper for physical art.

The original driver for this application was as a helper for me to learn how to mix paints. I wanted to be able to mix paints to match the colours from my reference images. But it has since grown into a whole suite of tools.

Reference image	help from The Artist's Helper	Final painting

Painting is simple. Just put the right colours in the right places.

Any questions?

Ok. There may be a little more to it than that. But this is the 21st century and we have the tools.

Our helper will look over our shoulder and give us advice.

It can help us choose the colours we need, tell us how to mix them and show us where to put them. It will watch our progress and will steer us back on track if we go wrong.

Let me do a rough sketch to start you off. I can print it scaled to the size of your canvas over multiple pages with page alignment markings for easy tracing or transfer.

I see you have drawn her left eye a little bit too low. You should correct that before you continue any further. It'll be harder to correct once you've started painting.

Her skin tone seems a bit too cool, consider a warm glaze. The background could be a little cooler though and more desaturated to add a sense of distance.

You can mix the colour for the folds in her dress with your cadmium red and a little of your quinacridone magenta.

Well, not exactly in those words, but close enough.

• Our helper looking over our shoulder is actually us importing photos of our work-in-progress.
• Its advice is the interactive charts, graphs and images it creates for us.
• If we show it our reference photo then it can use edge detection to create a sketch and print it out scaled to our physical canvas for easy transfer.
• From the reference it will help us work out what colours we need
• … and if we show it a photo of our available paints it can show us how to mix those colours
• … and if we then show it our trial mixes it will advise us how close we are and what else we should add.
• It can create images to preview how our painting would look using just those colours
• … and provide maps to show where we should be using each colour in relation to the sketch.
• It will compare imported photos of our work-in-progress to our reference and suggest changes.

…and more such as image filters and support for mosaics, tapestries and embroidery.

Once we are comfortable with various tasks, say we'd rather draw our own sketch or choose our own colours, then we can do those bits on our own. With each new painting we can take on more of the responsibilities ourselves until we don't need it anymore.

The goal of this application is its own redundancy.

Computers aren't always trying to take our jobs. Sometimes they want us to have theirs.

The Artist's Helper is all about learning to paint by copying reference images. The program's focus is on understanding the colours in an image, breaking the image down into areas of similar colour, value or hue, understanding how colours relate to each other and learning to mix paints to match them.

There is no help for drawing (yet) but we can trace a sketch generated by edge detection from the reference or we can draw freehand then load photos of our work in progress and use the comparison tools to refine it.

It's not cheating - it's a tool for learning. If you have problems with that then don't bother reading any further.

For if you cannot paint what you see you will find your self handicapped in trying to paint what you imagine. Harold Speed

The Artist's Helper helps artists with the craft of their painting but it doesn't help painters with their art.

It can help with the how not not the what or why.

In the same way violinist plays his scales, so as to acquire the capacity of producing pure tones on his instrument and training is ear to appreciate accurately the intervals between the different notes, so the painter trains his eye to perceive accurately the appearances on his retina, and trains his hand to express accurately these perceptions. Not that playing scales is music, or training the eye is art; but because without this training we have no control of the means by which artistic things are done. Harold Speed

Gallery

Hello, I am Bob. Delighted to make your acquaintance.

I'm not a painter but I painted these using little or no natural talent with the aid of the Artist's Helper and learned a lot on the way.

my wife Moya in a teddy bear hoodie
the proof of concept painting

Moya skiing in Tignes
monochrome is easier

Kyan
my nephew

Laika - u/adriD2
from r/redditgetsdrawn

@alexandramactavish & Felicity

Oakley - u/justynebean

Christmas Belles

Julie

Jeff

Eric

Greytcurls

Fiction

u/yacaughtme

u/rubythebean

u/t1nykat

u/MediocreIndependent

u/fallout42

Myriah

u/Flattie-Ratty

u/Flattie-Ratty again

ChronicIdiocy (aka u/Flattie-Ratty)

LilRed

If you follow the same processes there is no reason why your paintings shouldn't be as just good or better. I had a lot of fun making these and I have learnt a lot in the process.

The learning is the key. I believe that whilst producing these paintings I have picked up quite a few artist's skills. †

† An artist who has picked up some skills
is not the same thing as a skilled pick-up artist.
Shame.

About natural talent meh, skip this bit

When I say using little or no natural talent I am not saying I do not have any natural talent, only that I did not use any. I simply followed the Artist's Helper's processes and advice as rigorously as possible.

Just for comparison this is how awesomely talented I was without any help.

From a paint and wine party a couple of years ago

It is awful, isn't it? 😒 I didn't even have any wine.

Largely irrelevant but my drawing wasn't bad when I was (a lot) younger. Unfortunately I have not kept any old drawings I can show you though. But I was ok. Honest. These old scribbles are not really what I'm talking about.

Skills, not talents

Actually there's no such thing as natural talent. Not when it comes to painting. There is only understanding and practice.

What's more practice is somewhat over rated. When someone really understands a skill they can be pretty good even if they haven't actually done it before.

It is rare for anyone to study something practical without actually trying it as they go. Their attempts gradually get better and the practice gets the credit. But it is the study and the understanding which actaully makes them better.

Some physical coordination is required, which certainly benefits from practice, but it's a lesser consideration.

With trail and error the errors prompt research, but it is the solutions that cause the improvements not the mistakes.

Conversely, when practice is thoughtless repetition without understanding it is a waste of time.

Why is painting difficult in the first place? meh, skip this bit - come back later

Drawing

There are two approaches to drawing (at least):

Constructive drawing

where the the artist builds a scene from component parts.

Replicative drawing

where a visible scene or a reference image is captured and reproduced based on how it actually looks. The component parts and mechanics of the scene can be disregarded in favour of the final view.

Does anyone know better terms for these?

These two modes are respectively epitomised by:

• the computer rendering of three dimensional models
• photography.

Constructive drawing

To draw well with the constructive approach the artist must know a lot about the objects in the scene. They need to know the relative sizes and proportions of the objects and their component parts. They need to be able to mentally manipulate the parts and imagine how they will look from a particular orientation, where the lighting is coming from, how it will interact with each part and what shadows will be cast. They may need to understand perspective and foreshortening, loss of contrast and definition with increased distance and more.

The advantage of this approach is that a scene can be constructed from imagination.

The disadvantage is that it is hard to do well.

Worse, it is extremely easy to do it very badly.

It is easy to fall into drawing symbols representing the objects rather than the objects themselves. A child's drawing might show a person as a body with arms and legs and a head. The drawing represents what a person means to them rather than what they actually look like.

There is some great art that uses such symbolism and that would be fine if that was what I wanted. But it isn't.

A more sophisticated artist may use methodologies, such as perspective grids or the Loomis method for constructing sketches of the human head.

These are useful but it is difficult to put realism or character into such rule based drawings.

Replicative drawing

Hetch Hetchy

Forget about the drawing the concept of the thing and draw the appearance of the thing.

Using the replicative approach the artist does not need to know anything about the objects in the scene other than their relative locations and colours. Indeed it can be desirable for an artist to deliberately repress anything they know about the objects contained in the view in order not to fall into any traps of the constructive approach.

Draw what you see, not what you know to be there.

Techniques for this include imagining construction lines through the scene, measuring relative proportions with your out stretched thumb, reproducing the image upside down, and squinting a lot.

Think of colour first, subject last. Everything begins as an abstraction of colour. Sergei Bongart

The replicative approach requires the scene be visible to the artist (or at least have been visible if they have a great memory). The artist must study a the scene or reference in detail but they do not need to understand it.

A game console constructing a scene needs to understand its component objects but a camera capturing a scene does not.

Drawings can be a mix of the two approaches. Sometimes without the artist realising. This can be a good thing but it can also lead to disconnections. A modelled object, perhaps with incongruous, contradictory lighting, might be included in a scene and look like something cut out from a different picture.

On top of both approaches an artist may strive to depict the essence of a scene. The impressionists for example were interested in how a scene felt as well as how it looked.

But that is more about art. For now I am only interested in drawing and painting.

Colour judgement

A and B are the same colour #787878
©1995, Edward H. Adelson

Judging the colours in a scene is extremely difficult. There are so many optical illusions which can fool us into thinking that the same colour, repeated in different situations, can look wildly different in each. The lighting plays as great a part on the perceived colour of an object as its underlying local colour. If not more so.

A common technique is to block out the rest of the scene by looking through a hole in a card, a colour isolator, at an area in question. YouTuber Mark Carder uses a little colour checker thingy which also has a place to put his paint mix on to make comparisons.

Even discounting optical illusions it's still hard to judge whether two colours match. Getting them a little wrong doesn't seem such a big deal individually, case by case, but can make the final image look odd for reasons that can't always be easily fathomed.

The constructive and replicative approaches mentioned for drawing above are also relevant for colour.

When using the constructive method the colour used might be the known intrinsic or local colour of an object, green for a leaf, yellow for a lemon, but with added modifications for the angle and colour of the lighting, and the atmospheric effects multiplied by its distance etc. Tricky but not unachievable.

For the replicative approach the colour is what it is. The perceived colour is what it is too. There is no need to understand why that green looks blue in that context, just match the green and use it.

If that green looks like blue in the view then using paint of that green will look just like that blue in the painting.

If you think your colour judgement is good then you might like to try this little colour game later. Not now. I need you to focus here.

Colour mixing

Once we have determined what colour we want we still have the problem of mixing it from our available palette.

The difficulties are compounded by all the common misconceptions about colour theory. Don't get me started on the ancient lies about primary colours. Yet.

Beware that the term colour theory is used both for colour perception and and colour aesthetics. Two very different topics.

When I started all this I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. This problem was the main driver for me when I started writing the helper program.

Paint technicalities

It turns out that it's not so difficult once we get to know which experts to trust and which to ignore.

There are a lot of confusing rules which are often stated without explanation.

They make more sense once we understand the whys and wherefores (usually). All these and more will be dealt with properly later.

Always paint the darks colours first.

This seems to stem from it being easier to paint opaque colours over transparent ones. Commonly, light colours are opaque and darker colours are transparent. It’s usually easier to lighten a colour than to darken one.

But it ain't always so.

Darks-first does give a painting some shape from the outset though.

I quite like working outwards from the mid tones, extreme lights and darks last.

If you begin with the middle-tone and work up from it toward the darks so that you deal last with your highest lights and darkest darks, you avoid false accents. John Singer Sargent

Paint fat over lean.

A rule for oils (mostly). This stems from the need to paint slower drying paints over faster drying ones in order to prevent cracking. Add a little solvent to lower layers to make them dry fast. Add a little oil to upper layers to make them dry slower. Alternatively add something like Liquin to all the layers to make it flexible and crack resistant.

I'm not too worried about the longevity of my paintings. They are not that good anyway.

Oils are difficult.

Oil paints are unfairly maligned. They are not so difficult nor are they inherently toxic nor do they smell when wet.

Though admittedly some of the pigments in them are toxic. The same pigments are used in other paint formats such as acrylics or watercolours but it is always the oil paints that are singled out for condemnation. Perhaps it is because they are an older format and in the past even more poisonous ingredients were used and the fears linger on.

Oils also release some toxic chemicals such as benzene as they dry. Not much but you shouldn't hang around for extended periods where oil paintings are drying unless there's adequate ventilation.

And flammable. Spontaneous combustion of discarded drying oil soaked rags is not unknown.

It is also true that some of the popular solvents used with them are toxic and/or smelly. But we don't have to use any of those. There are alternatives for most.

Acrylics on the other hand dry much too fast for me. I can't find them relaxing. They also tend to get darker as they dry and their milky binder clears. It's not a huge change but still…

Water miscible oils are my current favourites. Best of both worlds.

You shouldn't use black.

This seems to be a confused, multi-part claim with conflated histories.

Some state it doesn't exist in nature.

Er,

a) yes it does and
b) there are situations black paint is still not black enough. Blackest black.

Some say you shouldn't have pure black anywhere in a painting as it can be deadening, harsh or flat.

Using black as a shadow colour can certainly look odd. Shadows are usually lit indirectly by scattered light and are rarely totally black. But sometimes they are. In tenebrism and chiaroscuro (pronounced: key-are-ruh skoo-roh) black can be used to dramatic effect.

Monet never used black.

But then he didn't paint dramatic candle lit interiors much either.

Using black to create a shading sequence from a pure, saturated colour can make the rendered object look awkward, flat and dirty. But shading sequences can be made with black and white for less saturated local colours.

Others state you shouldn't have black on your palette at all.

They are just wrong. I'll explain why later. At great length. With diagrams.

Although it is perfectly true there is no black in the solar spectrum visual phenomena are not entirely made up of light. There is the negation of light -- darkness. There are places where the light does not fall, although there is probably no shadow so deep but some light is not reflected. These omissions on the palate Rob most of the impressionist pictures of much of the dignity associated with really fine colouring. Harold Speed

Paint application

Again, not actually all that difficult. Once we know the right colours and the right places we can just splodge them in.

In some formats, where the individual brush strokes remain visible, this is the one place where practice is required as well as understanding.

But it's good to know what we are doing, about stroke economy and using stroke direction to lead the viewers eye, before churning out hundreds of practice studies.

Areas of flat homogeneous colour can look odd or dull in some styles of painting. Some variation of colour can add interest.

Some paints dry faster than others which can put us up against the clock. We need to plan our workflows to allow us to cope. Choosing the right brush sizes makes a fair difference.

Overworking an area can make it look awful. Mix the colours on the palette not the canvas.

But these are all minor hurdles that are easily cleared with a liffle forethought.

Real paint, real things and a strategy origins, skip this bit too

I needed a break from working with computers so I decided to take up painting.

Well, that didn't quite work out quite as I expected. I ended up wroting this!

I wanted to do real paintings with real paints.

I don't have anything against digital painting but there is nothing like a real painting. It has so much more romance. Our loved ones will surely swoon more if we present them with a gift of an oil painting than if we ping them an email with an attached .jpeg file.

I was only interested in learning representational painting.

Good abstracts are too hard. Easy abstracts are too lame.

…and don't get me started on paint pouring. 😬

I soon found that creating a real representational painting requires a daunting host of skills.

It is nigh on impossible to acquire them all in one go. It is so discouraging to produce the inevitable unsatisfactory miserable excuses-for-paintings while still in the learning process.

Now I understand why, when old paintings are x-rayed, so many have other pictures underneath. Abandoned. Buried. Lost.

Minor rant about tutorials feel free to ignore

Looking for help, I watched a lot of painting tutorials on YouTube. Some good, some not. They seemed to be made by people who either trotted out rules without much insight:

Get the shadow colour by adding its complementary colour.

Er, yeah, right.

You mustn't use black.

Pretty much wrong.

To get a good, vivid octarine¹ you should always mix raw hooloovoo² with a little burnt amaklor-kalish³.

Meh. Everybody knows this already.

Some of these guys are trying too hard to look good and come across as an expert. They disguise their mistakes and hide the areas with which they struggle even though those would be the most interesting and useful bits.

Or worse, people with tremendous natural talent who just knew exactly what to do but who could not see that there was magic in there that needed to be explained:

What we want here is a nice warm green, *splat*slap*daub*, just like that.

What? Wait! What the flip is a warm green?

There are no rules. Paint whatever you want, however you want.

Err, how?

draw the rest of the owl

That's a bit: draw the rest of the owl.

I need a more explicative and more prescriptive process. At least at the start.

TIL. this draw the rest of the owl phenomenon even has its own subreddit

Don't look at it now. Save it for later. I need you to focus here.

I will do my best not to fall into these traps.

Apologies if it means I end up writing walls of text. So it goes.

[1] octarine

a fluorescent greenish-yellow purple from the Discworld books

[2] hooloovoo

a hyper-intelligent shade of the colour of blue from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[3] amaklor-kalish

an ultra-violet that can be seen by Klingons in Star Trek.

So, I decided to cheat. I would automate as many of the requirements as possible. I could then pick from them and focus on a single skill, one at a time.

If I had tried to learn everything at once I would have probably just crawled into a corner and given up.

Learning to juggle and ride a unicycle at the same time is much harder than

learning to juggle,
and then learning to ride a unicycle,
and then learning to juggle whilst riding a unicycle.

This also meant that my initial attempts at painting produced decent outcomes which encouraged me to keep moving forward.

It allowed me to learn how to paint without fear.

I needed to come up with a learning strategy because that is the kind of geek I am.

The first key to good drawing and painting is good observation.

We cannot depict a golden retriever if we have never seen one before another minor rant, please ignore me

Even if we have seen lots of them can we really remember their proportions and colours well enough? Do we know what separates them from other dogs?

Then it is difficult to come up with specifics to give what we are depicting some character.

Even when we have an individual in mind and we know her well but we are not currently looking at her, do we really know her distinctive characteristics by heart?

Or are we just going to draw a generic golden retriever? Or even just a generic dog?

Even if we can remember her proportions, colours and characteristics, can we envisage how she would look mid leap? The enthusiasm in her eyes? Can we envisage her lit by a low early morning sun?

No. No we can't.

If you can envisage her and can depict her in all her exuberant, shiny goldenness then this site probably isn't for you.

Thanks for stopping by though.

Does it matter?

I keep seeing posts from people boasting about not using a reference. That seems a little foolish. I guess it's ok if you have a photographic memory but otherwise they see to turn out rather generic. If you have got a photographic memory then it could be argued you are using a reference.

There is a big difference between drawing a drawing of a dog and drawing Buttercup.

So that lead me to the first part of the strategy:

*** Always paint from some sort of reference. ***

But physical references are not always available. There are not many tigers near here. And they move. She's not going to sit for weeks while I figure out how to make a painting. Even when just doing landscapes the lighting keep changing and the snow melts.

So, key number 2:

*** Paint from digital reference images. ***

This immediately helps to solve many difficulties in one go.

Representational painting becomes put the right colours in the right places. A photograph can tell us both what and where.

Artists known to use reference photos include: Paul Degas, Vincent Van Gogh, Toulouse Lautrec, David Hockney …

Ok, but why digital reference images?

It is good to have a reference image to study but it is difficult to pull useful information from it. Digital images contain all the information we need in a format that can be easily interrogated.

So much for my taking a break from computers.

Colour mixing

I found colour mixing difficult. So I wrote a program to help me understand colour and work out paint recipes.

And thus the Artist's Helper was conceived.

We can select a target colour from the reference image. Then we need to tell the program what paint colours we have available as mixing ingredients. One way to do this is to load a photograph of samples spread out on a palette.

There are colour correction facilities for different cameras and lighting conditions. 🙄

The program displays our target colour and our ingredient paints in an interactive colour-space-widget. This shows us what ingredients to combine to make a trial mixture. Mixing lines are drawn to show what the various ratios of ingredient paints will give. We can photograph the trial mixes and load them into the application to find how close we are and what to add next to get closer still.

The screenshot above shows that I can mix my particular yellow and red to make "mix 1: Spanish Orange". I can then lighten this with titanium white to give "mix2: Desert Sand" which is very close to my sampled target of "Deep Peach".

This is as close as I can possibly get with the paints I have available. I'd need to by a more saturated pale orange to get closer but I now know not to waste any effort trying!

We can photograph and load the trial mixes to find how close we are and what to add to get closer still.

Rinse and repeat until the our mix matches the target colour.

More details can be found in tutorial 1 part 4.

A sketch

We need a sketch as a scaffold from which we can hang our paint.

I could already draw, kinda, so the Artist's Helper was not written to teach drawing. It is mostly for learning about colour. So let's just trace the reference.

I have plans for drawing tools in a future version.

Once you know what you're doing the only difference between accurately drawing from life and tracing a reference is just how long it takes.

If you want to make changes to the scene to emphasise or exaggerate an aspect it is as easy to do when tracing as when drawing.

Picking out suitable lines to trace is not easy in some photos. Scaling and printing it to the right size can be tricky too.

Lenna
Lenna sketch

I incorporated some code to produce a sketch from a raster image.

If we enter the size of our canvas our helper will scale it and print it over multiple sheets. Each sheet will have overlaps at the edges and markers to help line them up accurately.

Paint by numbers / rotoscope style outlines are also included later.

Details on creating, printing and transfering a sketch can be found in tutorial 1 part 3.

Colour breakdown

Seeing the colours in a scene is more difficult than it sounds (see colour judgement above). Judging the relative values of different colours, that is their lightness or darkness can be even harder.

Is that bright blue sky really darker than those sun lit white buildings? It can be, yes. What about when the sky becomes grey and overcast? Then, counter intuitively, the sky lightens and the buildings darken. What about when the storm rolls in? Then both the sky and the buildings darken so it's anyones guess. Measure it.

We can decide which colours we want to use by manually picking them from the subject, having the helper automatically choose some for us or loading them from a photo of the paints or colours that we have available (useful when we can't so easily modify our available colours such as for mosaics, embroidery etc.).

Once we have a trial set of colours it would be nice to see what a picture would look like using only these. We can add more colours to refine the picture further or disable some to simplify it.

The program has controls to define colour distance tolerances etc.

2 colours (Nōtan)

3 colours
7 colours
15 colours

Some artists like to paint in a similar way to how this sequence progresses. They block in areas of simple colours first to cover the whole canvas. Then they refine it in an iterative fashion gradually increasing the level of detail.

Others like to fully render each area as they spread out across the canvas. They do not return to previously covered areas so much. (Like the Laika the pitbul in the screenshot at the top of the page).

Yet others like to produce a monochrome underpainting first to ensure they have the drawing right before worrying about colour. The Artist's Helper can help with that too.

5 value greyscale
5 value burnt umber tone string

I have switched back and forth between the different methods and I'm still undecided as to which camp I am in.

Details on creating a virtual palette can be found in tutorial 1 part 2.

Outlines

As we now have a pop-art style block-in of colours it might be handy to have a outline map/cartoon of them.

These 'paint-by-numbers' maps can be transfered to the canvas along with or instead of the sketch.

That was great for me at the start when I was busy learning about the technicalities of paint. Now I prefer to transfer only the sketch to the canvas but then create an image which overlays the outlines over the sketch to create a map from which I can paint more freely.

The outlines get very complex but pre-filtering the subject image can remove a lot of noise.

5 colours
complex outlines
smoothed
simplified
printed and taped for tracing

The little blue rectangles show where I have sampled colours from the subject image.

No, not the masking tape. The other little blue rectangles.

Filters

Whilst I was writing filters for smoothing and simplifying I added some others for brightness, saturation, contrast, sharpness, hallucinogens etc.

You would normally want do all the filtering before colour sampling/breakdown/tracing etc. (Obv). But I didn't know that then.

original

brightness x 2.0

brightness x 0.5

saturation x 0.0

saturation x 2.0

Although it it possible to over-do these things…

Too much everything

Much too much everything

But is this art now?
No. No it is not. I am no Francoise Nielly. 😬

Although I do wish I'd have played with the filters like this before I did the painting. I might have incorporated the nice blue to green to yellow to orange to gold in the walls and ceiling in the one before last, just for a bit of fun.

Comparisons

Once the painting is in progress it is hard to see where we may be going wrong. What needs more work and what we should leave well alone? So I wrote something to compare photos of our work-in-progress to the reference image.

The program provides markers on the virtual canvas that can be transfered onto the real painting. When a photo of the canvas is loaded into the application these can be used to line it up exactly. The photo is stretched and skewed so it matches the original even if the photo was wonky.

I am in the process of writing more code to do the colour comparisons even when the painting is from a freehand drawing. It warps the one image to match the other before the comparison is done. (It will take time so don't hold your breath).

Several metrics are available and can be displayed in different ways.

It may not be immediately obvious how to read and use these but it soon becomes clear when you get in the swing of it. It is much more self-evident when it's your project and you can see the changes as you paint and take more photos.

Further detailed comparison information is shown about a specific spot as we move the mouse pointer over the images.

With most of these we are aiming to change the painting until the comparison images are completely blank.

Original photo: Oakley

The painting in progress

DeltaE: the colour shown indicates the colour distance between the subject image and a photo of the canvas.

Baseline: show areas whose colour difference is over a value specified with a slider control

Luma: highlight the differences in colour values.

Saturation: highlight the differences in saturation

Hue: it looks bad but large differences don't matter at low saturations.
Not a very useful measure but it is included for completeness. Somebody might need it one day.

HueAndSaturation: hue differences scaled by the saturation
Much more useful. We are looking pretty good here.

Difference: the same as the difference blending mode in GIMP.
May not be very useful?

Glaze: the colour of the glaze that would get the canvas closer to the subject.
Colour difference extended and exaggerated by a slider value. Pay particular attention to colours that aren't simply an exaggerated version of the subject, eg. the blue behind the nose.

These shots make my painting look bad but, for illustrative purposes, the gain levels have been cranked up to their maximums.

Besides, these show the painting still work-in-progress, not the final differences.

Though, to be fair, I didn't do a lot more other than sign it. 😉

Perhaps I should add examples from some paintings with specific problems. Later.

The comparisons can be misleading in areas where there is a lot of complex details or texture. Slight misalignment can show as a large colour difference. For example, this can be seen these images in the branches of the tree. Since this painting was completed I have written some more code for controls to allow some tolerance here (but it still needs more work).

The white areas near the top are because the subject photo didn't fill the whole virtual canvas. I wanted to get a nice composition and also had to account for the possibility of a frame.

It goes on and on. There's lots more already in the program and still plenty more to be added.

Who is the Artist's Helper aimed at?

It's aimed mostly at me, …but it has value for:

The absolute beginner who wants to paint but doesn't know where to start

… and who already knows how to draw or isn't too proud to trace.

Learn how to paint with the assurance of a satisfactory outcome for your endeavours.

With this software there is no need for dozens of time wasting, trial and error attempts which will probably be immediately discarded before you create your first worthwhile painting.

Wasting time on trial and error leads to frustration and disappointment.

Those first embarrassing efforts, floundering in the dark, can dent confidence and derail enthusiasm.

Practice versus guidance

We are often told that the only way to learn to paint is to practice, practice, practice. But practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. If we practice at doing it wrong we will get very good at doing it wrong. Habituated. We need guidance.

Learning from mistakes is extremely inefficient.

Guidance from the Artist's Helper can save us years of grinding. It cannot make us into artists but it can help us become good painters.

Nearly all great artists were good painters first.

And not just help us become good painters. Many of these techniques will work with mosaics, tapestries and embroidery too.

However, it will only help us learn to create works from reference images.

One step at a time. Once we can paint well from reference images then we can think about painting the dragons of our imagination.

And further tools for constructive drawing and painting are in the works.

We will soon be able to paint a decent picture without needing any of that old natural born talent rubbish.

Which is good because I have found natural born talent hard to come by these days.

The more experienced painter who wishes to understand the nature of colour

The colour visualisation tool can help achieve an understanding of the dimensions of colour. It can answer questions like why can a mix of blue and yellow look green? or why do mixtures of complementary colours produce greys?.

colour-space: blue plus yellow

The scholar who wishes to study the palettes of existing paintings

Drag an image of a painting into the colour chart to see the colours used in a three dimensional space which we can rotate, tilt and zoom.

Some seemingly colourful paintings have a surprisingly limited gamut. Ostensively vivid colours can instead be clever illusions using simultaneous contrast.

Some paintings have fluorescent colours which just cannot be achieved with standard paints.

But now at least I know and I won't get sad attempting the impossible.

Johannes Vermeer - Girl with a Pearl Earring - 1665 Francoise Nielly - UNTILTED 594 - 2011

The tutorial The very quiet call to action

So, now you know what it is, you should read the tutorial.

The Artist's Helper's helpers

The Artist's Helper's name is subject
to change if anyone's got a better idea.

… and the domain name is available.

I'd like to develop this into a proper product, maybe via a kickstarter campaign. The prototype is up-and-running but I need some help with testing it and especially help to sanitise and flesh out the tutorial.

I need Artist's Helper's helpers.

I am looking for two or three pioneer guinea pigs who want to learn how to paint and who are amenable to help me test the software.

A guinea pig painter
(He isn't mine, he's from youtube).

No artistic talent is required. Indeed it might be better if you don't have any to start with. But you must have boundless patience. Good communications skills will also help.

In addition to paints and stuff, you would need access to a computer, a camera and a printer.

The software will be full of bugs at first, which will be irritating, but you would have the complete attention of the developer, which will make a nice change, and you would have a green light to complain.

I also want pictures of *your* paintings to be included in the tutorials and galleries.

If you're interested email me: Bob.

Re the computer requirements. The program was written on a MacBook and has been fired up once or twice on a Windows 10 laptop but not really tested. It should run under any recentish Windows or Linux OS with a recentish java installation but I have not worked out the details. There may be extra issues, reconfiguring hotkeys etc. but it should be do-able.

This sounds interesting. It's like a way to play without having pressure to necessarily create something complete from nothing, which, when learning a new medium, is sometimes the hardest part. u/CinderQuill22 via r/learnart
(about tracing but applicable to the whole thing)

Application changes

If anyone has anything they'd like added just let me know.

Here are some changes I'm contemplating that I'd like some opinions on

Layer name changes. Some are confusing. It's difficult to write about paints in the tutorial when it might mean a layer, some physical paints, some palette entries. Also some layers have the same initial so the hotkeys are odd.

• paints -> preview or rendering
• subject -> filtered
• original -> unfiltered or reference (or possibly subject -> reference)
• canvas -> work or work-in-progress

Remove the Load named colours and Load cube palette… sub-menus and supply some palette properties files for them instead.

more to be added...

Website changes

I'm clearly neither a copywriter nor a graphic designer so if anyone has specific changes to the website they'd like to see then I'm all ears.

On the other hand I don't completely hate it at present so not every suggestion will be implemented.

I'd particularly like suggestions for cutting down on the verbosity without losing any anything helpful.

I think I'd like to stick to the informal personal (amateur) feel rather than attempt a slick corporate professional style. I couldn't pull it off anyway.

Redditors

Just to clarify: the no-adverts promise only applies to this linked page, helpers.html, not pages linked from it nor the eventual deployed home page.

I think you'll know by now if it was just clickbait for serving a page of ads. So don't whinge if you see ads elsewhere.

There aren't any adverts anywhere yet anyway (mid 2020).