Fantasy art guru and top-notch artist James Gurney is a font
of knowledge when it comes to so many aspects of drawing and painting. Whether
you are into fantasy images or tend toward more realist compositions, Gurney has
techniques and methods dealing with color, light, and form that are invaluable.
I love his blog as well and seek it out for inspiration on a regular basis.
Here's one of my favorites posts involving the use of Google's "visually
similar" search option. Enjoy!
For the last couple of
years, Google has had an image search option called "visually similar." This
locates images that are related by their abstract qualities, rather than their
associated keywords. For example,
here's a painting from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara called "Irish Elk," showing an extinct giant
deer in a high mountain landscape. The colors are yellow ochres and browns,
along with pale blues. There are no greens and hardly any reds.
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| Irish Elk by James Gurney |
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Google sifts through millions of
images on the web searching for other pictures with related image attributes,
and presents those that it finds "visually similar." In this case,
the images all have the same basic color gamut, a cluster of warm colors
combined with grays and blues. Presumably it selects other attributes,
such as gradation, complexity, texture, and shape.
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| Results of the Visually Similar search on Google for Irish Elk. |
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What I found surprising was that,
except for the helicopter and the dog, the results are all images of food. Why
food ads? I'm guessing that the curving vignette shape surrounding the busy
warm texture associated my picture with the curving shapes of plated
food.
Here's a sketch that I did with marker
pens, a high contrast rendering of a man at a podium. Google's search
program yielded results with dark silhouettes (not surprising) but the subjects
are mostly clothes that are symmetrical and laid out flat. I find this
puzzling. Why clothes? Why symmetrical?
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| Pen sketch by James Gurney. |
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Results of the Visually Similar search on Google for my pen sketch. |
Here's another of my Dinotopia fantasy paintings, a stone
monument at dusk painted in brown tones with a golden sky behind and a few cool
or gray notes for contrast. What did Google's algorithm sort out as similar? It
pulled a lot of interior scenes and very few outdoor scenes or paintings for
that matter. Perhaps the particular color ranges I chose for my gamut happen to
match those of indoor photos with white balance problems.
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| Ebulon by James Gurney. |
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| Results of the Visually Similar search on Google for Ebulon. |
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I find it fascinating that the results
of these "visually similar" searches cluster around specific families of
subject matter that are so different from the source image. And searching for
visually similar images is a great way to see our own color schemes from a
fresh perspective.
Another way to reach a fresh perspective on color is with Gurney's book, Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist
Painter, which has been a favorite of practitioners of art since it hit the
shelves. I'm especially intrigued by Gurney's approach to
"gamut mapping" and how to correctly choose colors for any given painting
scene. It's a must for any artist wanting to bridge the gap between abstract
theory and practical painting knowledge!