Never made anything like this before in my life.

Bouguereau has been one of my preferred painters.
Your manipulation gives an interesting result.
Will you share it?

neurolurker
I like very much.

dinasset, level_0, thanks for commenting.

It was made with GIMP and ArtBreeder. My first genuine art forgery, complete with faux museum-catalog-style title. I've been using ArtBreeder for some weeks now to make artificial intelligence faces of imaginary people that I could use as my own personal sources for Diego's drawing styles.

I was inordinately proud of this particular version. There were about 30 images combined and edited in various ways between what I started with (a Munsell palette reshaped with a Marquardt Beauty Mask) and this sad little boy ...

... ok imagine at this point that I go on and on writing in obsessive detail about every step of everything I did along the way and everything I thought about what I did along the way and all of it illustrated with annotated screen shots of each incarnation and transformation ... snip ...

... and so then I finished off my "real-looking" completely fake 19th Century painting of a sad, half-blind child with a photo of my ceiling as background texture and posted it without much comment because I have learned if I don't post things quickly they never get posted at all.

Just to add to the pathos I've also made a GIF version with falling snow ...

neurolurker,I would like to see the gif version.

level_0, thanks so much for asking. For posting, the one I originally made was about 9 mb, I assume too big to post. This is a very small, highly compressed version animated with the attached script on default settings. No attempt at making the snow size and speed realistic.





The attachment is Script-Fu; unzipped and in the scripts folder, it should show up under Filters/Animation/Animators.

neurolurker,
Thank for the script.I've never done any animation and I'm going to look for tutorials.

Left, original image from Unsplash by caique silva. Right, the surviving parts of the ArtBreeder pedigree/ancestry.

1: The Unsplash portrait was processed for symmetry in GIMP; I assume I cropped it too close to the chin and AB compensated for that (and the expected hair space left blank by the shaven head) by thinning and lengthening the neck pretty drastically. Procrustean process.

2: An "evolved" result using AB's editing controls. Her added hair fills the frame to the top and her neck is more normal.

3: A 20-year-old photo of my granddaughter whose face was made very wide by AB. Procrustes strikes again. (My granddaughter has given permission to post pictures of her.)

4: An AB result from the combination of images 2 and 3. This is a one-click process and I'm not sure what the underlying criteria may be for the blending of the two images. It appears there is clearly more to it than a simple one-two overlay could produce on its own.

5: A further AB evolution of Number 4. When I first saw the sad, big-eyed face in classic 19th Century colors I immediately thought, well, here's the Waif's sister.

Earlier this evening I ran dinasset's Draw Effect Syle X for the first time and found it produced a far more interesting digital texture than a routine "canvas" background. In the "Experimenting" thread I posted a faux renaissance image called Lisa's Cousin (possibly should have been "cousine") first re-lighting it with Paul Sherman's "Make Wonderful" script and then running Draw Style X. This one reverses that process, first applying the Drawing style and then using the re-lighting effect.

A mix of manipulations to get a very interesting outcome.

Thank you!

Good to see your recent work neuro. You seem to be bringing back some classic art styles.

Tas-mania, thanks for looking in. It's good to hear from you.