Wonders of Tech

Technology and art have had a relationship since the former gave birth to digital art in the 1980s. The sophisticated technology and software available to artists today offers a myriad of ways to experiment and create. Guest writer and multimedia artist, Daniel Clarke describes the tactile, layered experience of making art on his iPad Pro.

Remember those magnetic toys like an etch-a-sketch but with a magnet for a pen? Or how about the early touchscreen stylus that was basically a frame holding a hotdog so it mimicked the electrostatic contact of a human finger? Digital drawing tools have come a long way since then.

The Wacom Cintiq and the Microsoft Surface Pro are top of the line computers specifically built around interfacing directly with the screen. I’ve recently invested in a 12” iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil 2. I’m pretty happy with the results.

I resisted digital drawing for a long time. I carried a sketchbook and a variety of pens, pencils, crayons and things. I didn’t want to get sucked into an all-screen, all-digital lifestyle. I believed that there would be no going back. That remains to be seen.

CONTROL VS CHAOS
For a long time digital art ‘suffered’ from a kind of bold-faced perfection of clean lines and very deliberate effects. That is no longer the case. If you hadn’t tried one of the more modern tools you might assume that a digital stylus on a perfectly flat screen would give you, by necessity, a crisp clean line exactly where you put it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

For a start my new Apple Pencil can detect pressure. That on its own is a game changer. But wait, there’s more! Between the stylus and the screen it can tell what angle you’re holding it at; so you can get that look and feel of rubbing the side of, say, a soft pencil.

This is not just a matter of hardware either. I tend to use ProCreate which is an amazing drawing app for iOS, but there are lots of options. There are simulations of everything from an angled calligraphic pen that bleeds into the virtual paper to (my personal favourite) the splatter brush that sprays the canvas with blotches of varying sizes and slight variations in colour and transparency.

SENSE AND SENSUALITY
I mentioned look and feel above for a reason. One of the main objections to this kind of digital art that I’ve heard is that it’s like drawing on glass, that you don’t get the physicality and the feedback of organic materials. Now, I like getting elbow deep in paint as much as the next person on a Sunday afternoon but it’s not going to happen on the morning commute. Plus, I don’t think it’s as clear cut as that.

I believe that a big part of that feeling is a feedback loop. You make a mark and you see what happens. You put ink on top of ink and get a feel for how it moves. Every new medium takes some getting used to. Having played with digital brushes and their (programmed) eccentricities enough it seems to me that I can get a feel for them.

Maybe it’s an illusion, but how is that a problem when we’re talking about art?

Some of the latest simulations of watercolours and oil paints are simply amazing. Adobe Fresco is free and well worth your time just to see how they’ve made it tactile and a frankly, wet experience.

LAYERS UPON LAYERS
So that is how digital drawing can, for the convenience and portability, match to a pretty high degree a whole range of mediums and artistic tools. Then you have layers, which change the game all over again.

I like to sketch in (simulated) pencil. It’s easy to put that sketch onto a semi-transparent overlay while I do the colouring in. Then another layer for the proper outlines and I can turn off the sketch forever.

On top of all that I can add blended layers. We’re getting into technical weeds a bit here but it means I can paint in shadows and light, brightening or darkening the picture in a way that isn’t easy to do with oils and is all but impossible with watercolours.

Perhaps that seems like cheating to you. You might be right but in my opinion the masters of the renaissance were giant nerds who would use any technical innovation to their greatest advantage.

I still like to get elbow deep in paint but I also love my new iPad Pro.

Daniel will be exhibiting both physical works and digital prints at the Hong Kong Affordable Art Fair from 26 to 29 August.

Artificial intelligence has helped to recreate the lost pieces of Rembrandt’s famous painting, The Night Watch, and it can now be seen in its entirety for the first time in 300 years.

Painted in 1642, the Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq – better known as The Night Watch – is considered Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s most ambitious work.

The painting depicts a group of Amsterdam’s civic guard and Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, who also commissioned the painting. But it was unlike the usual Baroque military portraits, which were static and featured glum looking fellas sitting at a banquet or lined up in neat rows staring out at the viewer.

Instead, it was lively, brimming with the energy and noise of militiamen readying to march into action. It told a story – the painter’s equivalent of a snapshot – and was, in fact, the first portrait to see figures in a group actually doing something. The piece was also impressive for its size – approximately 13 ft tall by 15 ft wide – and dramatic contrast of light and shade.

When the painting was moved to what was then Amsterdam’s City Hall in 1715, it was trimmed to fit between two doors. Strips were cut from all four sides, mostly from the left side which lost 60 cm (2 ft). Another 7 cm was snipped from the right, 22 cm from the top and 12 cm from the bottom. These pieces have never been found.

Thanks to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam – where the original painting is displayed – the lost parts of the painting have been recreated using artificial intelligence. This is part of a large-scale research project that the museum set up called Operation Night Watch, which began in 2019 and is dedicated to the long-term preservation of the artwork.

“The fate of the missing pieces of The Night Watch remains a great mystery,” says Pieter Roelofs, Head of Paintings and Sculptures, Rijksmuseum. “Each generation has used the tools available to it to attempt to reconstruct the painting. Now we are doing the same, using the most advanced techniques currently available.”

To do this, the Rijksmuseum used high-resolution photography, machine learning, and a copy of the painting by Gerrit Lundens. On loan from the National Gallery of London, Lundens’ replica was painted before Rembrandt’s original was cut and therefore shows the work in full.

However, Lundens’ copy is one-fifth of the size of the original. As well as painting in a different style to Rembrandt, he also used different paint mixes. There are also distortions in perspective likely caused by him sitting on the left of the painting as he worked, and his version has aged differently to the original.

The Operation Night Watch team used an incredibly detailed, high-resolution image of the Rembrandt, and convolutional neural networks (CNN) – an AI algorithm that trains computers to recognise patterns and visual features in images using a multi-layer system.

“We made three types of algorithms,” says Taco Dibbits, Director of the Rijksmuseum. “One to identify perspective distortions and correct them; the second to recognise the colour scheme of the original and project it onto the missing pieces; and the third is the brushstrokes, the technique that Rembrandt used.” The result is a computer reproduction that looks as much like The Night Watch as possible.

The new panels, which are printed on canvas and now frame the original painting, reveal three additional figures on the left-hand side and a complete helmet (worn by the militiaman) on the far right. The composition has also shifted, so that the main figures are now more right of centre, rather than in the middle of the canvas.

“This project testifies to the key importance of science and modern techniques in the research being conducted into The Night Watch. It is thanks to artificial intelligence that we can so closely simulate the original painting and the impression it would have made,” says Robert Erdmann, Senior Scientist at Rijksmuseum.

This isn’t the first time that CNN has been applied to Rembrandt’s work. Back in 2016 the Dutch bank, ING Group utilised it – along with Microsoft and a team of 20 data scientists, developers, AI and 3D printing experts – to create a 3D printed Rembrandt painting, a kind of new old master, in a project called The Next Rembrandt.

The Night Watch and its once missing pieces now recreated by AI are on show at the Rijksmuseum for three months. You can watch a short video of how it was reconstructed here.