Art

[voxelproof]

In this topic I'm going to share screenshots, textures and mods devoted to creating and re-creating art.

Since it doesn't in my opinion fit well neither "mods", "maps", "schematics" nor "textures" section, I've decided to make separate thread. If anyone has created something interesting that can be regarded as a more ambitious piece of voxel art, it's a place where he/she can also post such creations. From my side I'd like to focus on old masterpieces of painting ( and not bother with copyright issues ;) ).

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Really not so easy to keep them in order.


Escapist poppies

Final version (better balanced clothing):



The canvas is of 254x183 size and the palette consists of 18 colours.

[voxelproof]

Another study of this famous masterpiece. This time it's transposed into 20 colours. The makeshift framing made of default wood nodes and, heh, gold, made me skew the picture to avoid screen display artifacts which were considerably spoiling the whole image.


More sun

There're some rogue pixels yet to be erased, but generally the result conforms to what was intended.

[voxelproof]

After a few minor corrections, it looks like this (though the frame is still rather provisional) :



The palette is close to a fully professional one. Regardless of what one thinks about the original painting or this re-creation, I am sure it'll be very useful for texture creators.

[Festus1965]

interesting
as I thought about to use my face in about 70*50 nodes to paint in minetest, a street in about 30 nodes high, with a view left and right to admin, mod, famous gamer they allow ...
prepared a small size 16 colored pic - and think about how to ...

[voxelproof]

interesting
as I thought about to use my face in about 70*50 nodes to paint in minetest, a street in about 30 nodes high, with a view left and right to admin, mod, famous gamer they allow ...
prepared a small size 16 colored pic - and think about how to ...

It's aesthetically risky with default colours ;) What I try to achieve is first of all to provide a set of imo valuable palettes for texture developers, and, secondly, explore a new medium and, maybe, pioneer in a new branch of pixel/voxel art with making sort of condensed art out of original creations. You may try making such self-portrait with the textures which (along with the modpack) will be released this week in this thread.

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Poppies once again (and not the last time I'm afraid cause Monet, as a world master of colours, can't be put off with just 20 of them ;) ) :



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One of the colours in the "Babel" palette is pretty close to the (in)famous Pantone 448c, regarded as the ugliest of all colours. Of course this was unintentional, such colour appeared by chance as a result of the edition of the template. For me it's a proof that there're no inherently bad colours, their perception and aesthetic merit depend on the way in which they are used.

[voxelproof]

This is the most iconic painting of the pointillist style. I've undertaken this challenge because I am trying to find and define links which as I believe exist between classic arts and pixel/voxel art and, more generally, electronic arts. The result exceeds my boldest expectations. One thing I can say for sure: experience of "pixel" art in voxel sandbox environment differs diametrically from viewing the same image in a window of a graphics browser and it's much deeper and better.

More: you won't find on the net better version of this painting in this resolution, and I dare to say that perhaps even these photographs which are in higher resolutions also don't deliver the spark of artist's genius so directly as this remake (which took a few days) does.

[voxelproof]

In this post I'd like to make clear what sort of creative art I'm pursuing by making renditions of the paintings of the most famous painters, and what sort of novelty lies in my opinion in the technique I'm trying to develop through these efforts.

The traditional attitude towards works of art is that they are conveyed to the spectator either through direct contact, or by its visualisations by the means of visual media like photography or movies, or by their copies. However at one point I realized that at least as far as painting art is concerned, there lies certain obnubilated stratum of artistic expression, which, so far, evaded recognition and which I'm hoping to move into the highlight of electronic arts scene.

This reflection came when I understood that the digitization of paintings (and sometimes, like in the case of „A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”, even digital rejuvenation) not only transfers their images into the cyberspace thus making them more easily available to a larger group of viewers, but also makes them actually more durable and persistent, and, sometimes, what's especially worth noticing, more authentic – hence, paradoxically, „more existing” and real.

The question I asked myself was „Is it merely a technological feat or is there maybe something more to it than just creating pleasing high-definition images of masterpieces of fine arts?” The answer is interesting for the consequences it brings to the way how we perceive what „art” is in general.

When we consider a book, it's quite obvious that, usually, its value lies in the text and not the paper on which it is printed. When we read a novel, we read the same piece of literature no matter whether we acquire its content through this or another paper edition or in electronic form. It's a widely accepted fact, that this is mainly provided information and not its editorial form that makes any text more or less interesting and valuable. In this sense, all works of literature are esentially „digital” albeit many of them came into being long before any media digital per se.

A very similar phenomenon refers to music. Musical notes are in fact „letters” of acoustic text, fixing the information about the artistically shaped sounds re-created later by a musician or an instrumental ensemble.

And, like a music, like great works of literature, paintings can also be examined on their purely informational level. And like a music itself becomes separated sensorially from the musical score it's derived from, any painting can be perceived not only as a unique in its material form item consisting of canvas and oil paints, but more like a score which serves to re-create it giving it new reading according to the individual interpretation of a re-creator. What I mean is that it is theoretically possible that by skillfull effort of an artist there can be obtained kind of „aesthetic singularity”, when „rays of artistic light” emanating from a given piece of art become concentrated by lens of the new medium in spectator's mind, placing the original work of art in unprecedented focus and revealing it as a pure information, cleared of all obscuring noise, unnecessary redundancies and contexts.

Such „singularity” has never yet been achieved by electronic media nor was ever attempted yet. What I am trying to do here is to examine whether this is just a fanciful pseudo-theory or, just the opposite, an astounding truth.

Such re-creations (proposed name „infograms”) come as a synthesis of pixel/voxel art and techniques of digitization and editing of photographs, but surely cannot be regarded as belonging to any of these two different branches of information processing.

[voxelproof]

General view of the tapestry: